(REDONE) Light Yagami vs Kaguya Shinomiya (Death Note vs Kaguya-sama: Love is War)
(all thumbnails made by me)
"When you're surrounded by a world of constant lies, manipulation, and deceit, that dark energy is bound to seep into you eventually." - Jeffery Bowyer-Chapman
🚨🚨SPOILER ALERT🚨🚨
Before we begin this blog, from here on out, major spoilers will be brought up from both Death Note and Love is War, including major plot points and character moments surrounding Light and Kaguya. That being said, if you are not familiar with either series and don’t want to be spoiled, I strongly advise that you stop reading from this point.Still here? Awesome, lets do this!
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Whether it’d be her control over negative emotions in public, the ability to scheme and manipulate like every other Shinomiya, and the many other techniques used by her family to get the upper hand, she has become very familiar with being the one to take control of the battlefield in her many years living under the Shinomiya roof. All this expertise is what would land her the spot of vice president in Shuchi’in’s student council where she would also learn how to best handle the school’s responsibilities as well as understand how people function socially so that she could better manipulate them to do what she wants.
Light is what one considers a strategic mastermind driven by his strong, albeit twisted, sense of justice. Possessing an extraordinary level of mental agility along with his skills as a brilliant strategist and tactician, he always takes the advantage of a situation despite the many risks that follow. He can predict people's actions with a single glance, process information at a fast pace, and even memorize the smallest of details and perfectly recall past events with memory alone. On top of all that, he is very perceptive of not only his own surroundings, such as when figured out his room was bugged from a few small differences in his door layout, but he is also perceptive of the very words that come out of his mouth, making sure he doesn’t arouse suspicion that he is in fact Kira. Light has no problem deducting people’s bluffs either, such as when he knew L was lying about more detectives arriving in Japan and when Light avoided L’s future attempts at baiting him out after he messed up the first time.
Where Light truly shines in smarts however are his capabilities as both a talented manipulator and a schemer. On the manipulator side, Light being socially adept makes him excellent at understanding humans and how they think, making it easy for him to trick and use them to his advantage. Whether it’d be his fellow allies such as Misa, Kiyomi and Mikami, FBI agents such as Raye and Naomi or even Shinigami like Ryuk and Rem, no one’s been safe from Light’s influence. An undertalked aspect of his genius is how he is able to control his emotions for a majority of the story. He manages to stay calm and collected in most situations, not letting any emotion get in the way of his genius unless he needs to play the part. He mostly succeeds in this area by donning a sort of fake identity in order to hide his true self, and no I’m not referring to *just* Kira. He can effortlessly play the role of a calm minded genius and son of the Yagami family as Light, or just as easily carry out the role of a cold heartless killer to the general public as Kira. Being able to juggle between these two personalities is impressive in of itself, but it especially becomes impressive when you realize that both personalities were able to trick geniuses such as L, making him believe that they were both completely different people. The trickery was so perfect that L ended up asking Light to join the Kira case and help despite Light being under suspicion.
People aside, he is also an absolute master at manipulating the situations around him with his complex, and quite frankly, absurd schemes. His skills as a master planner allow him to map out the most extreme of scenarios and pull them off without a hitch even with the few resources and lack of subordinates he has at hand. Before he makes his big plans however, he always makes sure to effectively test out his capabilities. When he first got his hands on the Death Note, he was able to effectively test it and use it to its full potential immediately after, surprising even Ryuk with the progress he made within 5 days. Later on he would also test out the true limits of the Death Note on a stock of criminals he had saved beforehand. Alongside Light’s testing he had also set up numerous precautionary plans to make sure he wouldn’t be caught off guard such as him changing the time of deaths to be random so the police couldn’t track him, him setting up deaths a week in advance in the off-chance he were to be hospitalized, and him setting up his room so he could tell if someone came in and his desk having a special setup that automatically destroyed the Death Note if someone were to open the drawer it was stored in.
When he isn’t cautious about the most minor of details, he’s pulling off the most ridiculous of plans like I mentioned before. We’re talking plans where he orchestrated an entire bus hijacking to get an FBI agent off his tail, the plan where despite 64 hidden cameras being set up in his room to watch his every move, he was able to continue killing by utilizing a hidden mini TV inside a potato chip bag while pretending to eat chips and study, and his most impressive plan to date, the plan where he purposefully lost his memory and gave his Death Note to another criminal to shift the blame while at the same time letting his now-innocent self trick everyone into thinking Light has no association with Kira, not only letting him escape containment but allowing him to eventually getting the Death Note and his memories back with his name now seemingly cleared. No normal person could’ve pulled off such plans but Light had pulled the right amount of strings and even had what could be considered supernatural luck on his side.
Everything Light has accomplished in the events of Death Note can absolutely be attributed to his smarts and he really does show this when he’s been able to outplay even the strongest of opponents in a battle of wits. Ever since he started going under the identity of Kira, he was able to outsmart the world’s best intelligence agencies and detectives and even hold his own in what was essentially an intellectual boxing match against the greatest minds on Earth for more than 6 years. This is impressive when you consider that Light was able to go toe to toe with geniuses such as L, the detective claimed to be the quote unquote “greatest mind in the world”. Even at a young age he had shown remarkable intellectual abilities, such as when he was able to solve the Winchester Mad Bombings case at the mere age of 8. He can solve the most complex of murders and mysteries within a day, fly a helicopter with intuition alone, and achieve top marks in every school subject without breaking as much as a sweat. He was even the mastermind behind two of the world’s three most influential detectives (not counting himself): Eraldo Coil and Deneuve. As stated in Death Note: Another Note, L had ended up reaching a level of intelligence that was equivalent to that of 5 ordinary investigative bureaus and 7 intelligence agencies, and it would only increase by the time he confronted Kira. Light should be able to scale to L in terms of intelligence since he was not only able to stand on equal footing with him but trick him on multiple occasions and stall long enough to find an opening in order to kill him for good. Light’s intelligence was so high in fact that L even mentioned how he would be a good person to take up the L role if he were to die.
With Kaguya being smart by nature, she’s been able to casually outsmart those around her with her tricky persona and even trickier schemes that are much more robust than anything her series could throw at her. She grew up to be a multi-talented genius that could do anything if she put her mind to it, and although she’s had many, MANY battles that she considers (and mostly are) losses on her end, a lot of those losses are caused by sheer misfortune, reasonable misunderstandings, or other factors that have nothing do with her overall intelligence. That being said, if we were to remove all those factors out of the equation for the time being, let’s see what Kaguya at her full potential looks like.
Kaguya was born with the gift of photographic memory, giving her the ability to perfectly recall past events and info with precise results. It’s so precise in fact that she only needs a quick glance at a piece of info to permanently remember it. With it, she’s able to master talents in an instant whereas it would’ve taken other months to do the same, perform any calculation in her head, and remember the most specific pieces of information such as the length of a fly’s wing. She can even replicate the same motions she’s made in the past by trusting her guts alone, which allowed her to perfectly get that consistent bullseye I mentioned earlier after only doing it once. Besides her memory, she also has keen senses that allow her to observe people’s behavior and analyze situations and in general thinks from a logical perspective. She’s always looking for ways to use people to her and her family’s benefit, going as far as looking at the people around her as tools she could potentially use in the near future. Her rational and realistic view on life lets her solve problems effectively and overall solve puzzles faster than her peers ever could.
With this greater understanding of how those around her think, she can utilize one of the most prominent traits she shares among the rest of the Shinomiya’s: her ability to manipulate. Her usual personality is that of polite and refined, which alongside her beauty and grace can allow Kaguya to lure people into a false sense of security, leaving them wide open for a (mental) attack. Funny enough, her first instinct is always to bribe her problems away since it’s a bad habit of hers, and sometimes it does allow her to keep people’s mouths shut and even influence their actions. Gag aside, she has multiple techniques that allow her to control one’s emotions in a psychological sense, with those techniques relying on her greatest asset: her ability to change personalities on a whim. Kaguya can be menacing enough to simply put a scary stare and cold demeanor to drive fear into those around her, or she can be cute enough with the help of a technique passed down between Shinomiya generations, which has her make a calculated expression and voice that quote “makes the gods’ heart beat faster”. If she needs to pull out the waterworks, then she can pull out the fake tears and make people feel guilty for her, and with the right amount of pressure, she can flat out switch entire personas and give herself a boost in intelligence while changing her methods to a much more ruthless approach.
Of course, you can’t be called a genius without having cooked up a few schemes, and Kaguya’s got numerous to her name. At the beginning of the series, she was already planning out entire scenarios in advance, knowing that characters like Fujiwara would gullibly set the stage for her, such as when Kaguya planted tickets in Fujiwara’s mailbox to eventually pressure Shirogane to take her to the movies, or when Kaguya read a book with love-related questions in advance knowing that Fujiwara would find it and bring it to the student council. When she’s not using Fujiwara to her advantage however, she’s set up plans such as when she almost cornered Shirogane into confessing that he lied about not having an umbrella, when she made the entire school go on a wild goose chase to find a wish-granting ring while giving Shirogane a hard time finding out her goal and her whereabouts, and even when she was held hostage by the Shinomiya company, she had already planned out an entire scheme to free herself from their clutches by pulling the strings behind the operation with the other Student Council members playing key roles in executing the scheme. There are even schemes where she utilizes the resources that the Shinomiya family gives her in order to give her control over the battlefield, such as when she had her staff scout out Shirogane’s location to make sure she could “coincidentally” meet up with him at the movie theater at the same time, or when she planted a bunch of her staff near a phone store in order to convince Shirogane to buy a new phone and get his line ID. This is all not even mentioning how she can figure out and even dispel others schemes just as well as she can execute her own like how she’s been subject to numerous mind games against Shirogane and managing to hold her own, if not, straight up winning some of them.
Speaking of Shirogane, to truly figure out how smart Kaguya truly is, we’ll need to compare her to her rival in intelligence. Shirogane is absolutely no slouch when it comes to his intelligence as he is a hard worker at heart, being able to get a top 10 score in Shuchiin Academy in his first year with moderate effort. This is impressive when you consider that Shuchiin Academy was originally created to educate the wealthy children that have the potential to become the new leaders of Japan, and soon enough Shirogane would put his all into his studies and become top 1 in scores and hold that record for numerous years. He’s even been able to rank number one on national exams more than once and eventually get into Stanford, y’know, one of the most competitive universities in the world. Academics aside, although Shirogane’s plans are much less robust compared to Kaguya’s, he has his own strengths in terms of superior adaptability and emotional intelligence, being able to break through plans and calculate the best ways to get out of tricky situations on the fly. Despite their differing natural talents, they manage to fight as equals in their mind games and as mentioned before, Kaguya is able to outsmart Shirogane multiple times and prove that she is a worthy opponent for our diligent president.
Originating from the Shinigami Realm, the Death Note is the primary force behind a majority of deaths in the series. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its limitations though, since the book has a LONG list of rules that can’t all be listed here, so instead, the relevant rules will be summarized here:
Light Yagami, the symbol of "justice" with a god complex from Death Note.
Kaguya Shinomiya, the "ice queen" of the Shinomiya bloodline from Love is War.
Wealth, fame, power.
These three attributes are what drive the human race to push themselves forward in life. Some would do anything to have even the smallest chance of standing on top of the world while looking down upon those they consider weak, a position that could only be reached by the gods and goddess of the greater universe. Too bad two teenagers have already taken these spots.
Fate would be on their side as they were not only born to be some of the smartest people in their entire verse but were essentially gifted the power to influence the world through other forces. With their cold demeanors and powerful tools at their disposal, they use calculations, deception, and manipulation to cook up the greatest and most excessive schemes to defeat their rivals once and for all in mind games of cat-and-mouse and are not shy to use their influence and power to morph the battlefield to their benefit. They are willing to do anything and everything to achieve their goals and come out on top.
But today, which of our two ego-fueled red-eyed high school masterminds will come out alive, and who will have their heart stolen?
Kaguya Shinomiya, the "ice queen" of the Shinomiya bloodline from Love is War.
Wealth, fame, power.
These three attributes are what drive the human race to push themselves forward in life. Some would do anything to have even the smallest chance of standing on top of the world while looking down upon those they consider weak, a position that could only be reached by the gods and goddess of the greater universe. Too bad two teenagers have already taken these spots.
Fate would be on their side as they were not only born to be some of the smartest people in their entire verse but were essentially gifted the power to influence the world through other forces. With their cold demeanors and powerful tools at their disposal, they use calculations, deception, and manipulation to cook up the greatest and most excessive schemes to defeat their rivals once and for all in mind games of cat-and-mouse and are not shy to use their influence and power to morph the battlefield to their benefit. They are willing to do anything and everything to achieve their goals and come out on top.
But today, which of our two ego-fueled red-eyed high school masterminds will come out alive, and who will have their heart stolen?
Before we get started…
Ok so here’s the deal. A lot of Death Battles that I’ve seen of Light mainly focus on the mind games and manipulation aspect of his character since that is not only what the core of Death Note revolves around but also due to a very severe lack of proper feats in the verse. I absolutely agree that it’s a reasonable way to make Light fight in a Death Battle and I wouldn’t be against it being tackled from that perspective in an actual episode, but to make this specific matchup a lot more interesting, we will be including EVERYTHING that both Light and Kaguya have access to with a single exception in terms of allies (see Before the Verdicts).
That being said, this blog will only be considering CANON material for both series just to keep the fight as fair as it can get. Luckily for Death Note and Kaguya-sama: Love is War, they’re both pretty clear cut on what is canon to the main story.
In Light Yagami’s case, he has a lot of retellings and spin off material under his franchise’s name, but the canon material should be the following:
In Kaguya Shinomiya’s case, she has about the same amount of material that’s just as simple to sift through with some weird cases mixed in here and there:
Now as for how this type of fight will be set up, let me explain. Both Light and Kaguya will be put into a hypothetical world where they are both at their peak potential regardless of the situations they or their groups are or have been in, so Light will be in his post-timeskip position where he’ll have access to L’s resources and Kaguya will still be working with her family’s corporation instead of splitting off from them. The circumstances of what their power and influence in the world is will be explained as we go further into the blog. They will be unaware of each other until they are told of the other’s existence. The best, and most fun way in my opinion, is to have Ryuk tell Light about the Shinomiya Zaibatsu and to have Hayasaka let Kaguya know about the threat that the serial killer Kira will pose. Light’s new goal will be to get rid of the Shinomiya Zaibatsu, which will put him into conflict with Kaguya, while Kaguya tries to uncover Kira’s identity and get rid of him once and for all. They will both also have a week of prep time since they work best when they have time to create complicated schemes like the overthinkers that they are mwahaha.
I think that’s everything I need to say so let’s get straight into it!
That being said, this blog will only be considering CANON material for both series just to keep the fight as fair as it can get. Luckily for Death Note and Kaguya-sama: Love is War, they’re both pretty clear cut on what is canon to the main story.
In Light Yagami’s case, he has a lot of retellings and spin off material under his franchise’s name, but the canon material should be the following:
- The original Death Note manga
- Death Note 13: How to Read
- The C-Kira Story
- Death Note One-Shot Special (2019)
- L: The Wammy’s House
- L: One Day
- The Death Note anime
- The Death Note anime official analysis guide
- Death Note: Another Note (The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases)
In Kaguya Shinomiya’s case, she has about the same amount of material that’s just as simple to sift through with some weird cases mixed in here and there:
- The original Kaguya-sama: Love is War manga
- Kaguya-sama Fanbook
- Kaguya-sama Last Official Fanbook
- Oshi No Ko (the manga takes place a few years after Love is War’s story finished)
- Kaguya-sama: The Seven Mysteries of Shuchin Academy
- Yu Ishigami Wants to Send A Gift
- The Love Is War anime*
- The Love Is War anime movie (First Kiss Never Ends)*
- The Love Is War anime OVA*
- Kaguya-sama Mass Media Club Spinoff*
Now as for how this type of fight will be set up, let me explain. Both Light and Kaguya will be put into a hypothetical world where they are both at their peak potential regardless of the situations they or their groups are or have been in, so Light will be in his post-timeskip position where he’ll have access to L’s resources and Kaguya will still be working with her family’s corporation instead of splitting off from them. The circumstances of what their power and influence in the world is will be explained as we go further into the blog. They will be unaware of each other until they are told of the other’s existence. The best, and most fun way in my opinion, is to have Ryuk tell Light about the Shinomiya Zaibatsu and to have Hayasaka let Kaguya know about the threat that the serial killer Kira will pose. Light’s new goal will be to get rid of the Shinomiya Zaibatsu, which will put him into conflict with Kaguya, while Kaguya tries to uncover Kira’s identity and get rid of him once and for all. They will both also have a week of prep time since they work best when they have time to create complicated schemes like the overthinkers that they are mwahaha.
I think that’s everything I need to say so let’s get straight into it!
Background
Light Yagami
"Look around you, and all you will see are people the world would be better off without."
For as bustling as the city of Tokyo can be, the citizens of Tokyo simply lived out their lives of peace and quiet without having to worry about any forthcoming danger, besides the occasional news report of a criminal on the loose. It was… too quiet. What more was there to life beyond the grim and unfulfilling reality of at-the-time current day Japan? This held especially true with a certain Japanese high-school student of the Kanto region, a hyper-intelligent student by the name of Light Yagami. Up to this point, Light has had a simple but boring life, yearning to become something more in life such as, perhaps, a god of the new world, and wouldn’t you know it, luck would strike. On that fateful day, a black book would fall out of the sky and into the school grounds that Light just so happened to be walking in, and this book was not just any book, but a certain supernatural book that could bring death in whoever’s hands it landed in, appropriately being titled the Death Note.
At first, Light simply thought the book was a prank and was hesitant on its ability to kill, but after giving it a shot, he learned of its true power and used to its full extent, leading to him causing hundreds of deaths within the next 5 days in an attempt to cleanse Japan of rotten criminals plaguing the innocent. Once said 5 days had passed by, the monster that had dropped the book in the first place would confront Light, introducing himself as Ryuk, one of the many Shinigami’s, aka Death Gods, who resided in the yet again appropriately titled Shinigami Realm. You think that with a title equivalent to death god he would be there to reap Light’s soul but it turns out that he was also bored with life, which led to him purposefully dropping the book into the human realm so that he could entertain himself by watching Light use the Death Note. After being fascinated by the supernatural nature of Ryuk and the sheer power of the Death Note, Light would decide to use it as a means of creating a perfect world that was free of rotten and deplorable people, deciding when other lives or died depending on his own moral code and choices. Only when every guilty person is out of the picture will Light stand on top of the new world as their one and only god.
As expected with all plans to take over the world, it wasn’t gonna be easy. He would quickly gain worldwide recognition under the alias of Kira, becoming a figure that was both feared and revered as the righteous judge that humanity needed. For as many worshippers he would’ve gained, he also gained just as many targets to his head. Light’s actions would end up capturing the interest of L Lawliet, the greatest detective in the world, along with many other law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the international police force. Soon enough L would catch Light’s attention and he would try to kill L for opposing his ideology but he ends up getting embarrassed, seemingly moving his goal to change the world as secondary as he would now focus on going after the guy who made a fool out of him.
With all these forces attempting to crack down on the identity of Kira, Light would have to engage in multiple cat-and-mouse games to ensure that he could continue killing as Kira, especially against L whom he considered to be an equal in intelligence and wits alone. Despite the odds, Light managed to evade all suspicion of him being Kira, going as far as carefully considering every word he spoke out of his mouth, creating elaborate schemes to throw his enemies off and overall manipulating the people around him to achieve his goals, even sacrificing the innocent to get his way. You’d think that using common people as tools while claiming that you’ll bring justice and order to the world would be hypocritical and it very much is, but Light’s character as a whole is simply complicated in nature.
The stakes were high but eventually, with an over-the-top plan and a bit of luck on his side, Light would finally manage to kill L, achieving victory in their short-lived but tense rivalry. He would end up taking on the persona of L, using his position to not only mask his identity of Kira but to essentially shape the world into what he envisioned at the beginning of the series. For the next five years, Light would use L’s criminal database records to bring even harsher judgements onto society, bringing it down into a dark age where Kira is the one in control. By the end of the timeskip, entire nations decide to accept Kira as their leader and it seemed like everything would go just how Light wanted. This ultimate power would end up digging him down a deeper hole of delusion and hypocriticism, turning into a much more ego driven dictator that only viewed people as tools that he could use to reach the status of god. Despite his questionable morals, it seemed like Light had finally achieved the godhood he has been fighting for this entire time. But the story couldn’t just let Light win, that would be boring!
Light may have taken away L’s entire persona but he couldn’t take away the legacy that L left behind, passing it down to his two successors Mello and Near. With their efforts combined and a bit of unluck on Light’s side, Kira’s downfall would ultimately begin. Despite his best efforts, Light would ultimately end up outwitted, outnumbered and cornered, leaving him to go insane and finally admit that he was in fact Kira all along. He attempts to salvage what is left but no matter what he did, he was already defeated. Depending on whether you have read the manga or watched the anime, the sequence of events can vary but both lead to the exact same result: an agonizing death for the serial killer that terrorized his world. He doesn’t even get to die by conventional means, but rather by the hands of Ryuk and his own Death Note. Throughout the entire story, Ryuk has been following Light around and has even helped him on a few occasions but he made a promise at the beginning of the story. He promised that he would be the one to write Light’s name when he felt the time was right. After all, Ryuk has only stuck around so that he could entertain himself, and with Light having no way to escape the dire situation, he made good on that promise. Light took his final steps, breathed his final breath and then he was truly dead. What he was able to accomplish was nothing short of incredible but the true nature of Kira and the Death Note leaves a lot to ponder about our society as a whole. Instead of getting all philosophical and stuff on the messages of Death Note because that’s for NERDSSS, let’s just wrap this background up.
In the end, Light may have won the battle against L but he just couldn’t win the war.
Kaguya Shinomiya
"I'm not a good person by any means. Perhaps that's why I have a longing for kindness that borders on obsession."
Love is a complicated thing. You fall in love with someone, confess your feelings, and become a couple. Everyone would say that’s a wonderful thing, but in truth, there exists a distinct power relationship between even the sweetest of couples. No matter the kind of bond between two lovers, one will always seize the role of dominator while the other will have no choice but to be the one that is dominated. This kind of chemistry may be overlooked by the common people but to nobles that refuse to lose their pride in the name of something as unnecessary as love, it is a matter of life or death, and no one is more familiar with these kinds of rules than the clever school girl and vice president of Shuchi’in Academy’s student council, Kaguya Shinomiya. Born into the family of the Shinomiya’s, her entire childhood up to her teenage years would consist of a life of wealth and protection, molding her into the ideal student that every high schooler strived for. She would become highly respected at her high school of Shuchi in Academy, becoming popular for her intelligence, beauty and copious amount of wealth attached to her family name. Despite all these positive aspects of her character, Kaguya’s high-class lifestyle turned out to be more of a nightmare than it may seem.
Due to the Shinomiya’s ownership of one of the largest conglomerates in Japan, they would have to play it difficult to get their children to follow in the family’s footsteps to continue the group’s legacy. The manner in which Kaguya was raised was that of essentially drilling the rules and expectations of the Shinomiya family into her brain at a young age, molding her into yet another tool the family could use to their benefit. She would be unable to interact with the outside world freely, not only having knowledge deemed “inappropriate” kept away from her, but also having to experience loneliness and isolation in order to stay within her family's policies: never rely on anyone, never receive from anyone, and never love anyone. At the end of the day, the Shinomiya family believed they were doing what was best for their only daughter and it wasn’t as if they didn’t care about her, it’s just that their methods can be considered downright inhumane, especially with how young Kaguya was at the time.
This kind of lifestyle turned Kaguya into the kind of person the Shinomiya’s had desired: a cold, calculated, and overall mean-spirited manipulator that always looked for ways to use people to her benefit. She was even nicknamed the Ice Princess for how cold she acted towards her classmates and her so-called “friends”. She could never make any potential friends without first putting them through “trust” challenges and her reputation and social status would prove to be too much for any regular student to handle. However, this wouldn’t stay true for long when she met a certain eccentric but bubbly pink haired girl who constantly had a smile on her face, Fujiwara. With the help of Fujiwara, Kaguya had finally opened her eyes, realizing there was more to life than manipulating everyone around you. Slowly but surely, Kaguya would change for the better, becoming a much more likable person by the time she finished her first year at Shuchi’in Academy. She was able to act nicer towards her schoolmates, gain a spot on the Student Council as their vice president, and experience feelings that she never would’ve, the most prominent of those being love. Soon enough, Kaguya would fall for the ambitious yet charming Student Council president, Miyuki Shirogane.
Despite the two of them being a match made in heaven as well as Shirogane sharing the same exact feelings towards Kaguya, this love thing wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Both stood on top of their separate pedestals, stubborn to stoop down to a level lower than the others’ due to their pride. The result of this stubbornness was an all out war of intellect between these two love-struck idiots to get the other to confess their love first. From that day on, they’d be fighting to steal the others’ hearts, determined to make the other say those three small words, “I love you”.
Mind games a plenty would ensue as they battled to unravel each others’ affection for each other, ranging from mundane scenarios such as walking under the same umbrella or sharing lunches to the craziest of schemes such as the entire sequence of events during the cultural festival. Through all the trials and tribulations in their conflicts however, both Kaguya and Shirogane eventually had to come to terms with the fact that nothing will move forward if they both continue playing this prolonged game of love if neither of them decide to make the first move. Their fear of taking that leap of faith is what caused them to be so headstrong and their insecurities about themselves as people certainly weren’t helping their cases either. They are both very aware of how they can handle making that first move, and yet, they’re unable to follow their own advice. They wouldn’t stay confined to their comfort zones forever however as the culture festival would mark a turning point where they both had no choice but to make that move and finally confess their feelings for each other.
With their fondness of each other revealed and a kiss between the two shared, this battle may have seemed like it ended but in truth, the war certainly hadn’t (haha see what I did there). Complications would arise as both Kaguya and Shirogane were now obligated to be honest with themselves and each other, meaning that they would have to learn to open up the sides of themselves that they were desperately trying to hide. In Kaguya’s case, it meant letting that cruel logical side of her take over, which was the last thing she wanted as she would end up pushing Shirogane away and make him question if any progress in their affection had truly been made. Eventually, with a bit of back and forth between the distinct personalities in her head, she would come to accept herself and confront Shirogane once more and get the true kiss that would solidify their relationship for real this time. Their love for each other would show no boundaries from then on as they would go on to do all the things your usual couple would do like go on dates, have sex, and treat each other as equals in their everlasting relationship.
Even when their tender relationship was torn apart by the Shinomiya family and Kaguya’s older brother Oko demanding that she’d be married off to the Shijo family to secure the Shinomiya Group’s power, their story was nowhere near over. Shirogane and the rest of Kaguya’s friends (Chika Fujiwara, Yuu Ishigami, Miko Ilno, and Ai Hayasaka) would band together to confront the Shinomiya family and rescue Kaguya from their clutches before it was too late. With everyone’s efforts combined, Kaguya would be the one to mend the conflict with her brother and eventually the conflict between the Shinomiya and Shijo family, finally closing that chapter on her life. Of course there are many other story beats I haven’t mentioned that add context to the overall story but if I were to elaborate we’d be here all day, and even if I did, it wouldn’t be entirely necessary to understand Kaguya’s story.
What is important to takeaway is that despite her menacing appearance, Kaguya has always been an innocent, fair and kind girl at heart, always wanting to do the right thing even if the environment she grew up in never made her think of herself as a good person. If she hadn’t ever met lively people like Fujiwara or good-natured people like Shirogane, she never would’ve gotten to forge the path that would let her connect with the world instead of hide from it. By the end of her story, she could finally do what makes her happy without her family holding her back, such as pursuing a career in… photography? A bit out of left field but if it makes Kaguya happy then what’s the harm? And of course, Kaguya would live out the happy ending with Shirogane that she had always wanted.
In the end, Kaguya may have lost the battle against Shirogane but she ended up winning the war.
Experience
Light Yagami
Light is certainly a capable person that can make the absolute best of situations when the plot doesn’t screw him over. Even before the events of Death Note began, he was already a genius in the academic field, managing to get first place on practice college entrance exams that are nationwide. Later in the story he ends up scoring perfect marks on the actual college entrance exam in every subject. He also turns out to be a pretty decent hacker too as he managed to remotely hack into his father’s computer, the database of a Yotsuba company computer (Yotsuba is a large company), and even the FBI system. That being said however, his father’s computer not only had unsecured firewalls but Light got lucky with having a Task Force member as his father, and Light needed assistance from his dad to hack the FBI, but being able to do the first two undetected definitely shows some skill.
Light also turns out to be a pro at tennis as he used to be the tennis champion of Japan so he is pretty athletic compared to your average student. We don’t know much else about his experience prior to getting the Death Note but he was certainly the perfect fit to wield such a weapon. To make up for the lack of past experience however, he has absolutely shown what he was capable of throughout the entire story.
Kaguya Shinomiya
Whether it’d be her control over negative emotions in public, the ability to scheme and manipulate like every other Shinomiya, and the many other techniques used by her family to get the upper hand, she has become very familiar with being the one to take control of the battlefield in her many years living under the Shinomiya roof. All this expertise is what would land her the spot of vice president in Shuchi’in’s student council where she would also learn how to best handle the school’s responsibilities as well as understand how people function socially so that she could better manipulate them to do what she wants.
Intelligence and Skills
Light Yagami
Where Light truly shines in smarts however are his capabilities as both a talented manipulator and a schemer. On the manipulator side, Light being socially adept makes him excellent at understanding humans and how they think, making it easy for him to trick and use them to his advantage. Whether it’d be his fellow allies such as Misa, Kiyomi and Mikami, FBI agents such as Raye and Naomi or even Shinigami like Ryuk and Rem, no one’s been safe from Light’s influence. An undertalked aspect of his genius is how he is able to control his emotions for a majority of the story. He manages to stay calm and collected in most situations, not letting any emotion get in the way of his genius unless he needs to play the part. He mostly succeeds in this area by donning a sort of fake identity in order to hide his true self, and no I’m not referring to *just* Kira. He can effortlessly play the role of a calm minded genius and son of the Yagami family as Light, or just as easily carry out the role of a cold heartless killer to the general public as Kira. Being able to juggle between these two personalities is impressive in of itself, but it especially becomes impressive when you realize that both personalities were able to trick geniuses such as L, making him believe that they were both completely different people. The trickery was so perfect that L ended up asking Light to join the Kira case and help despite Light being under suspicion.
People aside, he is also an absolute master at manipulating the situations around him with his complex, and quite frankly, absurd schemes. His skills as a master planner allow him to map out the most extreme of scenarios and pull them off without a hitch even with the few resources and lack of subordinates he has at hand. Before he makes his big plans however, he always makes sure to effectively test out his capabilities. When he first got his hands on the Death Note, he was able to effectively test it and use it to its full potential immediately after, surprising even Ryuk with the progress he made within 5 days. Later on he would also test out the true limits of the Death Note on a stock of criminals he had saved beforehand. Alongside Light’s testing he had also set up numerous precautionary plans to make sure he wouldn’t be caught off guard such as him changing the time of deaths to be random so the police couldn’t track him, him setting up deaths a week in advance in the off-chance he were to be hospitalized, and him setting up his room so he could tell if someone came in and his desk having a special setup that automatically destroyed the Death Note if someone were to open the drawer it was stored in.
When he isn’t cautious about the most minor of details, he’s pulling off the most ridiculous of plans like I mentioned before. We’re talking plans where he orchestrated an entire bus hijacking to get an FBI agent off his tail, the plan where despite 64 hidden cameras being set up in his room to watch his every move, he was able to continue killing by utilizing a hidden mini TV inside a potato chip bag while pretending to eat chips and study, and his most impressive plan to date, the plan where he purposefully lost his memory and gave his Death Note to another criminal to shift the blame while at the same time letting his now-innocent self trick everyone into thinking Light has no association with Kira, not only letting him escape containment but allowing him to eventually getting the Death Note and his memories back with his name now seemingly cleared. No normal person could’ve pulled off such plans but Light had pulled the right amount of strings and even had what could be considered supernatural luck on his side.
Everything Light has accomplished in the events of Death Note can absolutely be attributed to his smarts and he really does show this when he’s been able to outplay even the strongest of opponents in a battle of wits. Ever since he started going under the identity of Kira, he was able to outsmart the world’s best intelligence agencies and detectives and even hold his own in what was essentially an intellectual boxing match against the greatest minds on Earth for more than 6 years. This is impressive when you consider that Light was able to go toe to toe with geniuses such as L, the detective claimed to be the quote unquote “greatest mind in the world”. Even at a young age he had shown remarkable intellectual abilities, such as when he was able to solve the Winchester Mad Bombings case at the mere age of 8. He can solve the most complex of murders and mysteries within a day, fly a helicopter with intuition alone, and achieve top marks in every school subject without breaking as much as a sweat. He was even the mastermind behind two of the world’s three most influential detectives (not counting himself): Eraldo Coil and Deneuve. As stated in Death Note: Another Note, L had ended up reaching a level of intelligence that was equivalent to that of 5 ordinary investigative bureaus and 7 intelligence agencies, and it would only increase by the time he confronted Kira. Light should be able to scale to L in terms of intelligence since he was not only able to stand on equal footing with him but trick him on multiple occasions and stall long enough to find an opening in order to kill him for good. Light’s intelligence was so high in fact that L even mentioned how he would be a good person to take up the L role if he were to die.
Kaguya Shinomiya
Kaguya was born with the gift of photographic memory, giving her the ability to perfectly recall past events and info with precise results. It’s so precise in fact that she only needs a quick glance at a piece of info to permanently remember it. With it, she’s able to master talents in an instant whereas it would’ve taken other months to do the same, perform any calculation in her head, and remember the most specific pieces of information such as the length of a fly’s wing. She can even replicate the same motions she’s made in the past by trusting her guts alone, which allowed her to perfectly get that consistent bullseye I mentioned earlier after only doing it once. Besides her memory, she also has keen senses that allow her to observe people’s behavior and analyze situations and in general thinks from a logical perspective. She’s always looking for ways to use people to her and her family’s benefit, going as far as looking at the people around her as tools she could potentially use in the near future. Her rational and realistic view on life lets her solve problems effectively and overall solve puzzles faster than her peers ever could.
With this greater understanding of how those around her think, she can utilize one of the most prominent traits she shares among the rest of the Shinomiya’s: her ability to manipulate. Her usual personality is that of polite and refined, which alongside her beauty and grace can allow Kaguya to lure people into a false sense of security, leaving them wide open for a (mental) attack. Funny enough, her first instinct is always to bribe her problems away since it’s a bad habit of hers, and sometimes it does allow her to keep people’s mouths shut and even influence their actions. Gag aside, she has multiple techniques that allow her to control one’s emotions in a psychological sense, with those techniques relying on her greatest asset: her ability to change personalities on a whim. Kaguya can be menacing enough to simply put a scary stare and cold demeanor to drive fear into those around her, or she can be cute enough with the help of a technique passed down between Shinomiya generations, which has her make a calculated expression and voice that quote “makes the gods’ heart beat faster”. If she needs to pull out the waterworks, then she can pull out the fake tears and make people feel guilty for her, and with the right amount of pressure, she can flat out switch entire personas and give herself a boost in intelligence while changing her methods to a much more ruthless approach.
Of course, you can’t be called a genius without having cooked up a few schemes, and Kaguya’s got numerous to her name. At the beginning of the series, she was already planning out entire scenarios in advance, knowing that characters like Fujiwara would gullibly set the stage for her, such as when Kaguya planted tickets in Fujiwara’s mailbox to eventually pressure Shirogane to take her to the movies, or when Kaguya read a book with love-related questions in advance knowing that Fujiwara would find it and bring it to the student council. When she’s not using Fujiwara to her advantage however, she’s set up plans such as when she almost cornered Shirogane into confessing that he lied about not having an umbrella, when she made the entire school go on a wild goose chase to find a wish-granting ring while giving Shirogane a hard time finding out her goal and her whereabouts, and even when she was held hostage by the Shinomiya company, she had already planned out an entire scheme to free herself from their clutches by pulling the strings behind the operation with the other Student Council members playing key roles in executing the scheme. There are even schemes where she utilizes the resources that the Shinomiya family gives her in order to give her control over the battlefield, such as when she had her staff scout out Shirogane’s location to make sure she could “coincidentally” meet up with him at the movie theater at the same time, or when she planted a bunch of her staff near a phone store in order to convince Shirogane to buy a new phone and get his line ID. This is all not even mentioning how she can figure out and even dispel others schemes just as well as she can execute her own like how she’s been subject to numerous mind games against Shirogane and managing to hold her own, if not, straight up winning some of them.
Speaking of Shirogane, to truly figure out how smart Kaguya truly is, we’ll need to compare her to her rival in intelligence. Shirogane is absolutely no slouch when it comes to his intelligence as he is a hard worker at heart, being able to get a top 10 score in Shuchiin Academy in his first year with moderate effort. This is impressive when you consider that Shuchiin Academy was originally created to educate the wealthy children that have the potential to become the new leaders of Japan, and soon enough Shirogane would put his all into his studies and become top 1 in scores and hold that record for numerous years. He’s even been able to rank number one on national exams more than once and eventually get into Stanford, y’know, one of the most competitive universities in the world. Academics aside, although Shirogane’s plans are much less robust compared to Kaguya’s, he has his own strengths in terms of superior adaptability and emotional intelligence, being able to break through plans and calculate the best ways to get out of tricky situations on the fly. Despite their differing natural talents, they manage to fight as equals in their mind games and as mentioned before, Kaguya is able to outsmart Shirogane multiple times and prove that she is a worthy opponent for our diligent president.
Equipment
Light Yagami
Death Note
- The method of killing is simple: write a person’s name in the Death Note and they’ll be fated to die after 40 seconds
- You need to know the person’s full legal name and their face in mind or the kill won’t go through
- Misspelling their name 4 times will result in them being unaffected by the Death Note
- The death will still go through even if the Death Note or the page it was written on is destroyed
- Just a single scrap of the Death Note is enough to be used effectively
- The name can be written in anything as long as it is legible, such as ink or blood
- Simply writing the name kills the target via heart attack, or they can write down a specific cause of death within 40 seconds of writing a name down
- Causes of death can range from car accidents to suicide to getting stabbed
- Specific details need to be written within the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds (and can be freely change within that time period)
- The death will default to a heart attack if:
- It isn’t logical
- The target is older than 124 years old or younger than 780 days old
- If the target is fated to die within the next 12 minutes
- If the target will result in the immediate deaths of surrounding people
- Deaths can have their time and date manipulated up to a 23-day period
- You can control people’s actions with the Death Note, but you can only do so if it’s an action they can reasonably do and you can’t directly make one person kill another target before dyingLight has used this ability to reveal Mello’s location via writing down the name of one of Mello’s henchmen, Jack Neylon, and forcing him to mail a letter with the address of his whereabouts (chapter 69)
- Ownership of the Death Note can be relinquished to a Shinigami, with any and all memories of the note being forgotten and the Shinigami becoming invisible again
- Touching the Death Note again as the previous owner will restore all the memories
- Can be done up to 6 times
The Death Note itself is durable, being able to be ripped and torn apart while maintaining its function, but burning the book or any other method of making the pages illegible completely gets rid of the book.
Every single rule of the Death Note can be found here.
Since the Death Note needs a writing utensil in order to be used, Light carries a mechanical pencil with him at all times. Sometimes he uses a pen, but he mostly uses a mechanical pencil since he can erase unintentional mistakes as well as rely on lead instead of having to sharpen.
Given to Light as a gift from his dad for graduating high school, it may just seem like a watch that tells time, but it actually has a secret compartment that contains a scrap of the Death Note. He keeps it there in case he doesn’t have the Death Note on him or to kill someone without drawing a scene. The compartment can be accessed by clicking the watch 4 times, and it also contains a small needle which he can prick his finger with to write someone’s name in blood.
This bow is nothing but a simple modern bow with a draw weight of 15kg / 33 lbs. She can also set her arrow on fire like when she was in charge of lighting the school bonfire.
Kaguya carries around a small bottle of eye drops that she can use to pretend to cry. With this tactic, she is able to guilt trip people like Shirogane into listening to her.
Sometimes Kaguya dons a disguise consisting of casual clothes in order to spy on Hayasaka and make sure she’s doing her job correctly without getting anyone else’s attention. The disguises she dons in the series include:
In order to be prepared against any of Shirogane’s tactics, Kaguya had set aside 8 objects that would assist her in any scheme she needs to brew up. These 8 objects are known as the “Anti-Shirogane Secret Gadgets”, and out of all 8, only 2 of them had been revealed by the end of the manga. One of these objects is a 1,500,000 volt taser that Shinomiya calls “Hayasaka’s Zappy-Kun”. With the potential to one shot humans due to humans only being able to withstand voltage of around 10 to possibly 100, Kaguya had also realized its more convenient use as a memory wiper. As the manga states, according to research from the Netherlands, shocking someone while they are recalling a specific memory can erase it from their mind.
There are many instances where Kaguya felt extremely flustered at the sight, touch, or even mention of Shirogane, so with the help of her assistant Hayakasa, she developed a routine that allowed her to instantly calm down by putting her right hand onto her left cheek. This is an especially powerful technique whenever she needs to remove all emotion from her mind to stay focused on the task at hand. Her brain can and has gone fuzzy whenever Shirogane was physically present or even mentioned in the topic of love, but as seen in the story, her right hand needs to be free in order for it to work.
One of these personalities is “stupid Kaguya”, a personality mainly guided by happiness without any worries in the world. This personality mainly takes the form of a chibi version of Kaguya, and goes full force with the concepts of love and freedom with her mindset. That being said, this usually means that she never thinks ahead or what the consequences of her actions are.
On the other side, Kaguya still retains her cold-hearted self from years ago, that of which the personality is referred to as “Ice Kaguya”. Unlike her other personalities, changing to her Ice Kaguya personality greatly increases her intelligence as she is able to maintain a stronger focus on achieving her goal. In turn however, she comes off as cold and seemingly heartless, not giving a care for any of the emotions of the people around her. Simply her presence is enough to scare those around her, and the last thing someone wants to do is mess with her or they’d be on the receiving end of her mean-spirited schemes.
Depending on the situation at hand, Kaguya can switch between personalities in an instant if she’s under enough pressure, which while it can prove useful in manipulating people, other times it has greatly backfired on her. The only personality that could benefit her in a battle would be her Ice Kaguya self as she becomes a lot smarter and more determined to take down her opponents.
The way that reincarnation works in this universe is simple, in that when someone dies, they have the possibility of reincarnating into the body of a baby so that they can repeat their life cycle all over again. They retain all the memories and experience of their previous life too as seen with Aqua and Ruby in Oshi No Ko. It would also line up with the fact that the entire cast of Kaguya-sama were based off the characters from Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, meaning that although it’s only theoretical, there’s a high chance that they are actually the reincarnations of those original characters.
L’s greatest asset wasn’t his money however; his true power came from his influence. Being the world’s best detective has allowed L to gain the trust of government organizations around the globe and take charge of law enforcement under his robotic voice and computerized logo, so much so that he can mobilize every investigative agency in the world. Even when he loses the trust of entire governments, he still has his own personal investigators that solely work for him along with his ability to operate beyond the law. Light has used L’s connections to his benefit such as when he took advantage of the president calling “L” and arranged for foreign military units to kill enemies on his behalf. While Light hasn’t taken full advantage of the resources like how L did, these options are still available at his fingertips.
Contrary to everything I just mentioned, there does persist one current issue with giving Light all these resources. You see, all confidential data related to L was erased in Watari’s final few moments before death, which not only included all info on the Kira case, which is good for Light actually, but also included the rest of L’s info including his contact list and any other info that Light would need to replicate the original L . There could be sketchiness to using L’s resources if Light doesn’t handle them correctly.
Onto the eldest brother, Oko is quite literally the embodiment of everything the Shinomiya family stands for. When we first met him, he seemed a lot more friendly compared to Un’yo, seeming like he cared for Kaguya’s well being, but in truth, he is an extremely self centered and arrogant member of the Shinomiya’s that holds no attachment to the rest of his family; when you remove this facade, Oko’s main motivation becomes very clear: to use his skill as a businessman to secure his own fortune and power within the family no matter what it took.
As mentioned before, Kaguya would absolutely be able to convince them to work together with her if it meant that they could benefit from the situation, and trust me, they can.
In this scene, Kaguya becomes so flustered that she telepathically split the moon in half out of sheer embarrassment.
In this scene, Shirogane becomes so embarrassed by his actions from the night prior that he wipes the window hard and fast enough to create a giant laser that leaves the atmosphere within 2 seconds.
By using this feat from Shirogane, Kaguya can then be preemptively be scaled to his speed.
While I must admit that including these feats would be hilarious, there are three main reasons why some would find these to be unreasonable.
With all this drama going on over the course of months, the Student Council managed to conceive a specific plan using info on the Shinomiya’s that they could access through their specific connections to create a scenario where it was more convenient for the Zaibatsu to leave them be rather than fully going out of their way to stop them. They were also being massively underestimated by the Shinomiya’s since they were only seen as a group of teenagers to them that would pose no harm. If the Shinomiya group were to go up against someone like Kira however, they would not take the situation lightly or ever underestimate him like how they did with the Student Council. After all, they would recognize Kira as a force that could very well threaten and destabilize the conglomerate if not taken care of.
As for the Zaibatsu’s overall power and influence over the country, it was clear from the start that the Student Council’s goal wasn’t to cause the downfall of the Shinomiya’s but rather just to save Kaguya and then get the hell out of there. All they did was be too much of a pain for the family to deal with so they all just stopped bothering with the exception of Seiryu who was stupidly scared of getting canceled. At the end of the day, the Shinomiya’s were still easily the most powerful family in Japan, and if we want to put both Light and Kaguya at the peak of their power, then we would just have to ignore not only this loss but also their overall decline in power in modern times.
I’ll just say this off the bat, this matchup is gonna be COMPLICATED to figure out. There are so many factors that go into this fight that could give a variety of outcomes based on how you interpret all the information I’ve provided. I went about researching both Light and Kaguya’s full potential thinking there would be a clear cut winner but after literal HOURS of sifting through the entirety of their canon material, I could see an argument made in either’s favor. It’s even proving difficult for me to try and type out my own verdict as there are just so many places where I could begin.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s split the verdict into numerous sections and see where Light or Kaguya dominate in each category.
Light was essentially fighting a handicapped L during pre-timeskip, subsequently caused by L’s moral limitations that prevented him from doing everything he need to in order to win, as well as L not knowing of the existence of the Death Note and Shinigami’s as a whole. Of course this wouldn’t prevent L from taking the right steps towards deducing Kira’s identity but this proves that L wasn’t on top of his game, and if Light was struggling against this version of L, then he simply cannot compare to L in terms of analytic and strategical smarts. He is still very much a good strategist, especially compared to someone like Kaguya, but in his own verse, he’s been beaten out. Post-timeskip events prove this further by Light incapability to prepare against the likes of Mello and Near. As “L”, Light was given full control of the kidnapping operation by Near as a sort of test of his capabilities, and not only did Light make inadequate preparations to deal with Mello and his crew but Mello was able to deduce that there were two Death Notes and ultimately get access to one. Light would also fail to prepare against Near when they eventually confronted each other as Near read him like a book and anticipated every move that Light would make. Keep in mind that both Mello and Near were considered inferior to L in smarts, but despite their gap in intelligence, both of their efforts were able to put Light into danger and eventually take him down. This is all not even mentioning how fate was generally on Light’s side as he took extreme longshots that had almost no chance of succeeding, but despite the odds the series treats it as if it was supposed to happen. It would be harsh to say that Light cheated but the writers were basically on his side until the final few chapters of the story.
Now, due to the insane variability of this match-up, let's tackle some other possibilities. Any attempts from Light to emotionally manipulate Kaguya would be easily stopped due to her Hand Technique and Ice persona allowing her to remove her emotions, making it pretty useless here, while the same isn't necessarily true for Light, but we'll touch on that later. The Shinigami Eyes would basically be worthless here due to his refusal to use them, and even if he did, recall how Hayasaka can perfectly imitate Kaguya. While Light is a genius at picking up on the smallest of details, he has no way to look past a PERFECT imitation, and since he wouldn't know what Kaguya looked like there's a very solid chance he kills Hayasaka believing her to be Kaguya, only for Kaguya to later revive her, now with the knowledge of who Light is (yeah, that shit comes into play lol). Of course, there's basically a 0% chance that Light would ever use the Shinigami Eyes, but this was more brought up as an example to why, even if they were included, they wouldn't really help. Ryuk is a terrifying tool on paper, but his lack of interest in interfering, combined with the limited distance he can fly means that he won't actually impact the fight much. Assuming Light did get to someone who knew of her identity, Kaguya does have the option to erase their memories of her name or where she is currently residing with the taser, and while that would be cruel, that's why we have the Ice persona. And finally, Kaguya constantly has bodyguards and assassins protecting her, so even if Light (somehow) convinced the Japanese Task Force to go after her, and they somehow found out where she was, or he just decided to confront her alone, she would be more than safe (and with the stats difference, she probably doesn't even need help). Now, most of things up until know have revolved around Kaguya stopping Light, but how will Kaguya ever catch Light? Well, recall her massive arsenal of investigators by her side, alongside her own intelligence. One may argue that Light could outsmart all of them like he did previously, but this brings us to the main event...
While it's called tertiary factors, let's be frank, this is the backbone of the debate. First, who's smarter? This is a tough as hell question to answer, but overall, it's likely that Light is more intelligent individually. He managed to outwit L and the Japanese Task Force at their peak, which consisted of the world's greatest detectives, while Kaguya only outsmarted a weakened Shinomiya family. However, due recall that Light did need quite a bit of luck to succeed in his plans, while Kaguya still managed to outsmart a $1 trillion dollar corporation composed of multiple mega geniuses, albeit while they were distracted. It's extremely hard to compare both of these properly to get a quantifiable value, so while it's most likely that Light is smarter, it's probably not by much. Now, when it comes to manipulation, Kaguya would actually hold a considerable advantage. She was trained FROM BIRTH to manipulate others, which is a level of training that almost no one would have, especially not Light. He may be a genius manipulator, but don't forget that his emotions do get the better of him on very rare occasions due to his own ego. I won't act like he'll be making mistakes the entire time, but as it's been shown in Death Note, he has the tendency to underestimate other's abilities, which, over the span of a drawn out battle like this one, could lead him to making a mistake and being manipulated, especially when he's up against MULTIPLE geniuses. Don't forget, Kaguya has 2 brothers and Hayasaka, who are all master manipulators, likely better than Light (at manipulation.) He may have been able to defeat one genius, but against 4 supergeniuses that would each be attempting to exploit any level of weakness, it's very likely he would eventually slip up, and here is where Light would struggle most, experience.
He has never had to deal with an organization on the scope of the Shinomiya Zaibatsu. Compared to L's inheritance, the Shinomiya Zaibatsu would have 10.15x more money than L, and it's complete control over the Japanese country and influence across multiple others would yield a level of dominance far and above anything Light has had to combat before, and again, 4 super geniuses. Eventually, he will make a mistake as he is manipulated by the Shinomiya, and once he is found, there's not much he can do. Of course, it's important to discuss the wincons for either. As mentioned, this match-up is complex, so we'll be looking at the most likely outcomes for both and work our way down from there. Light's most secure wincon would be to enter Shuchi'in Academy, after extracting her name and location, and confront her face to face, before killing her sometime later. This entire plan relies on Kaguya 1. Not getting her friends and family, or even herself out of the country, 2. Not erasing the memories of her brothers, 3. Not wearing a disguise, 4. Not letting Hayasaka pretend to be her, and 5. Not being suspicious of Light upon meeting him, as he would be a new student that conveniently entered the school around the time Kira would be looking for her, who is a super genius and who also wants to specifically meet Kaguya. All of this combined makes it highly unlikely, and even quite risky, for Light to attempt this and succeed, as him joining the academy at all would turn him into a suspect, and most likely lead to him being caught. In terms of other even remotely possible wincons... yeah, he doesn't really have anything else that's realistically possible. Now, for Kaguya to pull off a win, her best bet is simply pulling the long game. While Light will eventually fuck up, this would most likely take a very long while, but because she perfectly counters all of Light's options, all she really has to do is wait till Light runs out of options and either makes a mistake, or comes to Shuchi'in, where she could pin him down once and for all. Do recall how Light would have to get a look at Kaguya to kill her, which would mean getting close. This is the WORST case scenario for him, for many reasons. A. It would leave him open to interrogation, as Kaguya would naturally try to interrogate a suspect of Kira. B. Even if he manages to escape that, Kaguya would send her investigators and assassins to keep an eye on him, due to him still being a suspect, preventing him from simply writing down her name to win. C. It leaves him very open to being fooled by Hayasaka's disguises, as they are, indeed, perfect, which could lead him into thinking he's won and getting overconfident, similar to the ending of Death Note, which would allow Kaguya to easily figure out who he is. And D. If Kaguya becomes convinced at any point that Light is Kira, she could take him down herself. Recall how she's a martial arts master with a significant stat advantage, a katana, and a bow and arrow. If Light attempted anything rash, she could take him out right there and there, and remember, her family controls the law, so no fear of repercussion there.
Lastly, let's cover their characters. Both can be caught off-guard and fucked over by a chaotic factor they didn't anticipate or plan for, which would normally make it a non-factor, however, Light would have a MUCH harder time anticipating anything Kaguya could do than vice-versa. Remember, Kira's personality and vague ability is basically public knowledge, while Light would have no way to prepare against some of Kaguya's abilities and options. Like, how is he supposed to prepare against Kaguya reviving people? If he ever revealed his identity to ANY of Kaguya's investigators as he's killing them (like what happened with that one detective from Death Note) she could just revive them and find his identity. There are so many ways that Light could lose solely due to Kaguya possessing an ability or attribute that he'd have no way to prepare against. On the other hand, if any of Kaguya's plans ever fall apart, she has back-up from friends and family like Hayasaka to save her from such situations (again, Hayasaka disguise go brrr), and this is truly what this match-up comes down to. While Light's ego pushed away or killed the people who supported him, Kaguya grew and realized how important meaningful connections truly are. While Light's only support is a group who is merely a shadow of their former selves because of him, Kaguya has the backing of people who at least care for her, which is truly the deciding factor. Ironic, in a sense. Overall, Kaguya would take tertiary factors. In conclusion, while Light may be a formidable and seemingly unstoppable foe, and while this battle coukd likely go many, many ways, Kaguya's own training, stats, perfect counters, and variety of support allowed her to track down and end Kira's rule. While Light may have wished to become the God of the new world, he could not survive this battle of war and love.
Every single rule of the Death Note can be found here.
Mechanical Pencil
Wristwatch
Kaguya Shinomiya
Bow and Arrow
Fake Tears
Disguises
- A green jacket, black pants and black high heels
- Entirely black outfit complete with a black hat
- Brown beanie hat, black pants and a green shirt
Taser
Abilities
Light Yagami
Shinigami Eyes
Offered by the Shinigami via the Eye Deal, the Shinigami Eyes grants anyone who takes the offer the ability to see the names and lifespans of anyone the user looks at. No matter if someone is taking on a completely different identity or not, the Shinigami Eyes will see right through their disguise and show their real colors. However, this comes at a deadly cost, as the user’s own lifespan will be halved as a result of the deal.
Mu
This is not specifically an ability of the Death Note or even of Light’s but it is important to mention as it’s an effect caused by usage of the Death Note. When someone uses the Death Note, they will be fated to go to a world of nothingness after they die. No heaven, no hell, or any other form of afterlife can save them from essentially ceasing to exist while belonging nowhere after death.
Kaguya Shinomiya
Acrobatics
As a byproduct of Kaguya’s absurd athleticism, she is extremely agile, having enough stamina to jump from wall to wall and make huge leaps from one story to another and such. She has no problems jumping over fences and swinging around on poles to give herself enough momentum to fly through the air.
Kyudo
Kaguya is a master at Kyudo, which is the art of the bow and arrow. In the past, she had been a champion of the national Kyudo competition, where she successfully shot at the target for ten consecutive times. She’s also in charge of lighting the bonfire with a fire arrow for the culture festival.
As a byproduct of Kaguya’s absurd athleticism, she is extremely agile, having enough stamina to jump from wall to wall and make huge leaps from one story to another and such. She has no problems jumping over fences and swinging around on poles to give herself enough momentum to fly through the air.
Aikido
Another art that Kaguya has mastered is that of Aikido. Aikido is a martial arts that’s mainly used for self-defense, where an attacker’s strength and momentum is used against them. Kaguya has used this to tackle Shirogane to the ground as well as to pin Ishigami to a couch.
Katana
Apparently Kaguya also knows the art of the katana, although it’s only briefly mentioned and never actually shown on panel. As one would very well know, a katana in the right hands can completely cut off limbs or even decapitate your average joe.
Hand Technique
Multiple Selves
This isn’t really considered an “ability” or “skill” of Kaguya’s, but it’s a trait of hers that was a result of her slow shift in personality. Her “main self” is the primary face that Kaguya puts on towards everyone in her life, but deep down there are two other personalities that are what make who she is in the present day.
One of these personalities is “stupid Kaguya”, a personality mainly guided by happiness without any worries in the world. This personality mainly takes the form of a chibi version of Kaguya, and goes full force with the concepts of love and freedom with her mindset. That being said, this usually means that she never thinks ahead or what the consequences of her actions are.
On the other side, Kaguya still retains her cold-hearted self from years ago, that of which the personality is referred to as “Ice Kaguya”. Unlike her other personalities, changing to her Ice Kaguya personality greatly increases her intelligence as she is able to maintain a stronger focus on achieving her goal. In turn however, she comes off as cold and seemingly heartless, not giving a care for any of the emotions of the people around her. Simply her presence is enough to scare those around her, and the last thing someone wants to do is mess with her or they’d be on the receiving end of her mean-spirited schemes.
Depending on the situation at hand, Kaguya can switch between personalities in an instant if she’s under enough pressure, which while it can prove useful in manipulating people, other times it has greatly backfired on her. The only personality that could benefit her in a battle would be her Ice Kaguya self as she becomes a lot smarter and more determined to take down her opponents.
Resurrection
There is no explanation as to how Kaguya was able to do this but she’s able to resurrect people from the dead with a simple tap to the face. She’s only done this a single time in the canon novel "The Seven Mysteries of Shuchi'in Academy" where she not only scared Ishigami to death but managed to revive him afterwards.
Reincarnation?
Oshi No Ko is a series that was written by Aka Akasaka, the same guy who made Kaguya-sama: Love is War, and despite its… current status in the story (yikes!!), it does provide us with one important concept in the Akasaka verse. With both series being canon to each other via a cameo in one of Oshi No Ko’s extra chapters, it would mean that the concept of reincarnation from its first few chapters would carry over to the world of Kaguya-sama.
Associates
Light Yagami
Ryuk
Beyond the world of humans, there lived a realm that contained a species of death gods known as the Shinigami. Living out their lives in the appropriately named Shinigami realm, they wrote down the names of humans that were on the brink of death to extend their own life spans out of fear of what would happen if they were to pass away.
One of these Shinigami was named Ryuk, and as previously mentioned, he was utterly bored of this lifestyle.
Wanting to make life more interesting, he tricked the Shinigami king into giving him a second Death Note, which he then tossed into the human realm so that it could fall from the sky in the human world and into a random person’s hands. It just so happened that fate chose to let Light Yagami wield the book. As a Shinigami, Ryuk was simply a watcher, not only in a literal sense with his natural invisibility and intangibility from the rest of the world but also his choice to not directly interfere or assist Light unless Light bribed him with one of favorite Earth treats: apples!
As a Shinigami, Ryuk comes with numerous supernatural abilities that make him surprisingly capable in a fight. Like I just mentioned, he is naturally invisible and intangible to all humans except for anyone who possesses the Death Note, with Light being the prime example, and anyone who touches the Death Note will also be able to see Ryuk. Despite being intangible, Ryuk also has the ability to materialize and dematerialize, which allows him to touch and hold solid objects or phase through walls. He also has access to wings that give him the ability to fly as far as they please within the human realm, although Ryuk decided to give himself a limit of 14 kilometers in the 2019 one shot. As mentioned before, every Shinigami is always equipped with their very own Death Note as well as the ability to grant their assigned Death Note user the Shinigami eyes. If all that wasn’t enough, then I should mention that Shinigami are unable to be hurt by conventional means whatsoever. Whether it’d be knives, firearms, or even huge explosions, Ryuk will always come out unharmed.
In terms of pure power, Ryuk can actually be considered useful in a fight. He’s physically strong enough to lift up people with one arm, has stated that he can fly 14 kilometers “in a moment's notice”, and tank room-sized explosions, and this is all while he can bypass physical attacks with his intangibility while ignoring durability with the Death Note.
Now whether Ryuk could be useful in an actual fight is a good question because there could potentially be one thing preventing him from interfering.
There’s a rule set in stone that if Shinigami’s save any human from their determined deaths, they will be sacrificing themselves and would turn to dust soon after. That being said, there is the chance that Ryuk can help Light in a fight if he is bribed, but otherwise he wouldn’t want to willingly save Light from death, and even if he was able to, Ryuk wouldn’t hesitate to kill Light himself if he really needed to.
Ryuk
One of these Shinigami was named Ryuk, and as previously mentioned, he was utterly bored of this lifestyle.
Wanting to make life more interesting, he tricked the Shinigami king into giving him a second Death Note, which he then tossed into the human realm so that it could fall from the sky in the human world and into a random person’s hands. It just so happened that fate chose to let Light Yagami wield the book. As a Shinigami, Ryuk was simply a watcher, not only in a literal sense with his natural invisibility and intangibility from the rest of the world but also his choice to not directly interfere or assist Light unless Light bribed him with one of favorite Earth treats: apples!
As a Shinigami, Ryuk comes with numerous supernatural abilities that make him surprisingly capable in a fight. Like I just mentioned, he is naturally invisible and intangible to all humans except for anyone who possesses the Death Note, with Light being the prime example, and anyone who touches the Death Note will also be able to see Ryuk. Despite being intangible, Ryuk also has the ability to materialize and dematerialize, which allows him to touch and hold solid objects or phase through walls. He also has access to wings that give him the ability to fly as far as they please within the human realm, although Ryuk decided to give himself a limit of 14 kilometers in the 2019 one shot. As mentioned before, every Shinigami is always equipped with their very own Death Note as well as the ability to grant their assigned Death Note user the Shinigami eyes. If all that wasn’t enough, then I should mention that Shinigami are unable to be hurt by conventional means whatsoever. Whether it’d be knives, firearms, or even huge explosions, Ryuk will always come out unharmed.
In terms of pure power, Ryuk can actually be considered useful in a fight. He’s physically strong enough to lift up people with one arm, has stated that he can fly 14 kilometers “in a moment's notice”, and tank room-sized explosions, and this is all while he can bypass physical attacks with his intangibility while ignoring durability with the Death Note.
Now whether Ryuk could be useful in an actual fight is a good question because there could potentially be one thing preventing him from interfering.
There’s a rule set in stone that if Shinigami’s save any human from their determined deaths, they will be sacrificing themselves and would turn to dust soon after. That being said, there is the chance that Ryuk can help Light in a fight if he is bribed, but otherwise he wouldn’t want to willingly save Light from death, and even if he was able to, Ryuk wouldn’t hesitate to kill Light himself if he really needed to.
Japanese Task Force
With the leaders of the group being that of L and Light’s own father, Soichiro Yagami, the Japanese Task Force was created with the sole purpose of tracking down Kira and arresting him. In an ironic twist of fate however, Light would end up joining the group and even end up leading them once L died. The Task Force is made up of many highly regarded police officers from the NPA who were trusted to deal with the Kira case. The Task Force would be disbanded once Light was found out to be Kira.
L's Resources
Once L had died at the hands of Light, the identity of L would need a successor that could keep up his legacy as the greatest detective in the world while making sure the public had never found out about his passing. Luckily, or rather EXTREMELY unluckily (is that even a word?), Light would be the only viable person to take up the role of L when the world still needed him. Little did the Task Force know, now that Light had rid of L and took his place, Kira could truly stand on top of the world for many years to come.
We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves so let’s start from the top. At the beginning there was a kind-hearted man named Quillsh Wammy, but you may recognize him under the nickname “Watari”. He had become famous as an inventor and with the fortune he had gained, he used it to found numerous orphanages under his name. Soon enough, he would end up finding an 8 year old L and take him to Wammy’s House, an orphanage that was built with the purpose of training gifted children. Little did Watari know, he had just found the up and coming world’s best detective.
L would show to have incredible intelligence at such a young age as previously mentioned, whether it’d be educating Watari on stocks to multiply his fortune by 20,000 times within two years or casually solving the Winchester Mad Bombings, but with the latter specifically, it sparked something in L according to Watari. There was a sort of shine in his eyes when he found the killer, and from that moment on, Watari knew what path L was gonna walk down.
He would set up L to be the detective the world needed, pouring all his efforts and resources into giving L everything he needed in order to pursue his new hobby of crime solving. Knowing that he’ll be in grave danger if anyone found his identity, L set up his detective identity to prevent anyone he doesn’t find trustworthy from ever accessing any personal info or even from seeing his face. In fact, the only way anyone could contact L was through Watari, and besides his messenger, Watari was also the one responsible for connecting L to others around the world and everything else regarding L’s daily life such as clothing him, feeding him, and managing the financial side of L’s resources. Without Watari, L never would’ve been quite the sensation that he was in his world.
Speaking of finances, let’s talk about money stats babyyyyyy. Before we continue, I just want to say that Light won’t be getting L’s inheritance for the fight as it would contradict the plot (see Before the Verdicts). We’ll just be money scaling for the fun of it.
There is no official statement regarding how rich L truly is but we can absolutely estimate. For starters, what we are told can be useful to give us a sort of baseline. L has managed to solve over 3,500 difficult cases in his detective career and for every case he solved, he would get 1 million dollars. That would mean that L would’ve gotten 3.5 billion dollars over his entire career, and that’s only considering the cases under the “L” identity and not his Eraldo Coil and Deneuve identities. Let’s just say that they all hypothetically earn the same amount of money to really highball L’s richness; highballing the other detectives would result in L having 10.5 billion US dollars to his name, which is, you know, quite a LOT.
We haven’t even considered the amount of money that Watari had invested into the “L” identity yet. Once again, it’s unknown how much money Watari had before and after L… or that’s why you might think. You see, when L was educating Watari on stocks, he asked Watari to invest 1 million pounds in the stocks he chose. Using this 1 million pounds as a lowball and multiplying it by 20,000 times, we get a total of 20 billion pounds. Now if we were to factor compounding interest by estimating the rate of return (ROR) between 1987 to 2004 (1987 was when L was 8, 2004 is the year the story started in), then there would be an average ROR of 7.6%, meaning that the 20 billion pound investment has now become 70 billion pounds, or around 88 billion US dollars, in 2004. Yep, that’s just a little moreee than our previous calc.
Once L had died at the hands of Light, the identity of L would need a successor that could keep up his legacy as the greatest detective in the world while making sure the public had never found out about his passing. Luckily, or rather EXTREMELY unluckily (is that even a word?), Light would be the only viable person to take up the role of L when the world still needed him. Little did the Task Force know, now that Light had rid of L and took his place, Kira could truly stand on top of the world for many years to come.
Shout out to u/bloodyrevolutions_ for this calc, I hope you’re fine with me using it.
With a minimum of 98.5 billion dollars to his name, L has had some interesting things done with his money. He bought out an entire skyscraper for his base, bought a 3 million dollar helicopter to corner the current Kira suspect, and when Near eventually inherited L’s fortune, he casually threw out 20 million to distract the rioters outside his building that Light had sent to corner Near.
Contrary to everything I just mentioned, there does persist one current issue with giving Light all these resources. You see, all confidential data related to L was erased in Watari’s final few moments before death, which not only included all info on the Kira case, which is good for Light actually, but also included the rest of L’s info including his contact list and any other info that Light would need to replicate the original L . There could be sketchiness to using L’s resources if Light doesn’t handle them correctly.
Japanese Police?
I had to put a question mark on this one because Light doesn’t exactly have any control, let alone full control, over the Japanese police. Rather, Light has managed to secure a position in the police force called “information processing administration division of the info-commercial bureau”, aka, the position that lets Light see the files of criminals. I bring this up because by joining the national police agency, Light now has even greater access to the police database than ever before. He had prior access when he hacked his father’s computer but this position gives him complete access to all their files without any real consequences.
The Japanese police can still be messed with regardless of how much influence Light had as either Kira or L, proven by the event where Mello’s gang had abducted the director of the Japanese police without anyone stopping them.
Kaguya Shinomiya
Hayasaka
Kaguya is an especially capable person but she owes a lot to her personal maid for carrying out more complex tasks and schemes and putting up with her behavior for basically her entire lifetime: Ai Hayakasa.
Having her family absorbed into the Shinomiya’s family, Hayasaka worked as Kaguya’s servant ever since she was 7, but their relationship is more close to that of sisters. Having to hide the fact that she worked for the Shinomiya’s, Hayasaka was forced to carry out the most ridiculous requests of Kaguya’s, becoming professionally trained to counter a wide variety of situations. With all this training, Hayasaka learned numerous skills that allowed her to flawlessly carry out her master’s wishes.
Unlike Kaguya who’s completely useless in the technology department, Hayasaka is comparably a full-on master. She’s been shown to have great hacking skills when the scenario calls for it, such as when she was able to hack into the wifi of the Shinomiya household, having no problem hacking into the Student Council’s security system, and even hacked into the computer of one of Kaguya’s brothers. She’s also created her own tech that allowed her to use it in secret, such as her hat shaped tablet and scrunchie shaped phone that doubles as an alarm for whenever Kaguya is in trouble. She even assembles her own computers in her spare time and, gasp, knows how to use Twitter, unlike a certain rich girl, oh how shocking!!
Alongside her tech, she also carries around a small knife and a taser with her whenever she needs to fight her way out of a situation. But one of the most valuable assets to her arsenal would have to be her multiple disguises and don the many fake identities that all have their own unique backstories and attributes. The level headed and loyal maid of Kaguya’s, the rule-breaking and energetic school girl, the gentle and flirty Hayasaka-chan, the formal and masculine Hayasaka-kun; Hayasaka can even disguise herself as Kaguya, with one example being the one time where Kaguya needed to escape her household without her staff noticing she left, and Hayasaka was able to replicate her down to the way she poses and talks. All of these disguises are used in a number of situations, and due to that, no one has figured out her true identity other than Kaguya (and Shirogane later down the line). In general, Hayasaka is the most resourceful member of the entire main cast, usually being able to make the most out of any situation.
Aside from her set of skills, Hayasaka following in the steps of the Shinomiya family allowed her to learn her own methods of manipulation. Lying as easily as she breathed helps her give others a false sense of security and she can go about changing people’s actions by predicting their actions and thought processes, which she’ll then be able to intervene at the right moment and misguide them into doing the action that’ll benefit her. Whether she’d be redirecting people away from the Student Council when Kaguya needs space or when Hayasaka herself successfully manipulates people like Kaguya and the Mass Media duo, she compares to Kaguya and Shirogane in terms of pure psychological smarts and perhaps even surpasses them.
When it comes to physical capabilities, Hayasaka should be at the very least equal with Kaguya, if not a little less or more capable. The Hayasaka family was regarded as a family of ninjas which holds up when her mom is a fully trained fighter herself and Hayasaka showed similar fighting capabilities when she had to tussle with a few of Un’yo’s henchmen. She is pretty agile too considering she was able to weave between lasers guarding the Student Council room. Even if she doesn’t have as many feats compared to Kaguya, it’d make sense that they’d both stand as physical equals in the story.
Shinomiya Zaibatsu
Little is known about the origins of this group, but in the alternate reality where the events of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter were an actual historical event, aka the Love is War universe, the Zaibatsu’s, or Japanese conglomerates, were never dissolved after the end of World War II. Out of the zaibatsu’s that survived, only one truly managed to rise to the top and become a name feared across Japan and even globally: the Shinomiya Zaibatsu.
As one of the biggest conglomerates in the world, the Shinomiya Zaibatsu owns two hundred trillion yen (or 1 trillion+ in US dollars) in assets along with great influence over the entirety of Japan, having over 4,000 companies under the Shinomiya umbrella and almost 900,000 people employed. For reference, as of 2023, the richest family in our world is that of the Al Nahyan Family from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, helming a total fortune of 305 billion US dollars. The fact that the Shinomiya Zaibatsu is at the very least triple the amount in assets alone would be terrifying if they were to exist in the real world. With Kaguya being the only daughter of the Shinomiya Zaibatsu, she is considered to be the princess of the conglomerate, having easy access to numerous of the company’s resources as well as being protected by them at the same time.
The Shinomiya Zaibatsu is so tightly knit that the mere presence of Kaguya in the country had been hidden from the world outside of Shuchiin Academy and other more recent events. Kaguya had almost never been in public outside of Shuchi’in Academy and policies were set in place to prevent Kaguya’s face from ever showing up in photos that could've been made public by the news. Not only that, but the Shinomiya Group have a strangle-hold on the press, which is how they were able to keep every aspect of Kaguya’s private life from ever being released to the public. Besides the press, the Shinomiya family has great influence over everything in Japan from its police forces to the court system, allowing them to completely disregard and work beyond the Japanese Law. Even Shuchiin Academy is under the Shinomiya’s control, even though they don't have the right to enter the school themselves with the exception of Kaguya (and if I didn’t make it clear enough, not just anybody can enter Shuchiin school grounds if they don’t attend as a student or work there). As mentioned before, the Shinomiya’s influence can even stretch to countries outside of Japan, being described as functioning similar to a mafia in places such as France.
Besides the numerous Japanese organizations and laws they control, the conglomerate has numerous personal resources that are just as, if not, more on-hand and useful. Some of these resources include numerous bodyguards to protect the important members of the Shinomiya family, assassins on standby, and private investigators that follow their target and sneakily build a profile on them. Said investigators are so good at their job that they were able to dig up info from the most personal of events. With the copious amount of money at their disposal, they could afford as much help as they could ever need, and Kaguya has a degree of control in this. She doesn’t have access to *everything* the Shinomiya group controls but she’s able to use a majority of the company’s resources freely. It wouldn’t be unrealistic to assume that she can convince her brothers to help her if it was gonna end up benefiting the company greatly, especially since the conglomerate is not scared of getting blood on their hands.
Whether it’d be sending people away to other countries, making families disappear, or being responsible for multiple casualties, The Shinomiya Zaibatsu is an absolute force to be dealt with, ruthlessly disregarding human lives for the sake of expanding their business and power across the country. The company had always been rotten and corrupt to the core, using people for their own gain and never forming any meaningful relationships with anyone that would be considered “useless”. After all, their aforementioned family rule of the Shinomiya family is to never rely on anyone, never receive from anyone, and never love anyone.
Gan’an Shinomiya
Gan’an Shinomiya is the head of the Shinomiya Zaibatsu and Kaguya’s father. As her dad, he is very cold and neglectful to Kaguya, having ordered Kaguya to be raised in an environment that was overprotective and shielded. He expected only the best out of Kaguya, forbidding her from doing activities that would get in the way of her becoming the maiden the Shinomiya family needed. Despite his actions, he still cares about his daughter but doesn’t know how to express that affection well.
With the exception of him taking time to teach his sons how to use people to their advantage, he is often away on business trips to expand his power but he soon becomes too old to keep going and eventually dies, passing the mantle onto the eldest brother Oko.
Older Brothers (Oko, Un’yo, Seiryu)
The younger side of the Shinomiya family, excluding Kaguya, helped run the entire Shinomiya business alongside Gan’an.
Going from youngest to oldest, we start with Un’yo. He was the brother who taught Kaguya everything she knows, being the only brother to actually love Kaguya. In fact, he in general shares a lot of traits with Kaguya’s colder side. Un’yo can be considered a comparable force despite his lack of power in the family, using intimidation tactics such as when he exposed the truth about Hayasaka’s role in Oko’s plan.
Onto the middle brother, Seiryu hasn’t had much prescence in the series but from what we’ve seen, he’s an absolute idiot. He confines himself to Oko as his lap dog as Ur’yo describes it, acting as his spokesperson when needed such as when he confronts Shirogane to end things properly. His smarts take a huge dip when he not only accidentally gives Shirogane the funds he needs to rescue Kaguya but later on is cornered by Fujiwara and Ilno’s plan to expose him online if he didn’t immediately back down.
Onto the eldest brother, Oko is quite literally the embodiment of everything the Shinomiya family stands for. When we first met him, he seemed a lot more friendly compared to Un’yo, seeming like he cared for Kaguya’s well being, but in truth, he is an extremely self centered and arrogant member of the Shinomiya’s that holds no attachment to the rest of his family; when you remove this facade, Oko’s main motivation becomes very clear: to use his skill as a businessman to secure his own fortune and power within the family no matter what it took.
He would end up being the person responsible for forcing Kaguya to drop out of school and be married off to the Shijo family as an attempt to prevent a war between the Shinomiya and Shijo families. He is always aiming for situations that would put him in the best of positions, seizing opportunities that he could take advantage of such as the state of his father’s health and the uncertainty of who could lead the Shinomiya’s after his passing. His ambition and obsession with securing his father’s will to become the next leader is the result of Oko wanting to think about the future of the Shinomiya group since the Shinomiya family’s collapse could lead to thousands of people’s lives being affected, but it proves difficult to carry out the group’s survivability since he is well aware that he lacks the ability or charisma to gain the respect of Gan’an’s servants and completely helm the family. In the end, he would fail to stop the Student Council and be forced into a corner, but Kaguya was merciful enough to let him continue down his path of inheriting Gan’an’s will because she believed that he was the only one fit to run the company.
Despite the three brothers not having the best of chemistry between each other, they’ve been able to work together and attempt to subdue the Shijo problem as well as the Student Council from getting Kaguya back. They did end up being outsmarted by a bunch of teenagers that were too smart for their own good but things still worked out in the end for everyone (see Before the Verdicts).
Feats
Light Yagami
Overall
- Was the top student of the entirety of Japan
- Kept his identity of Kira successfully hidden for many years
- Gained an absurd amount of followers which includes entire countries
- Reduced the global crime rate by 70%
- Avoided the forces of the JP police, NPA, and JP Task Force
- Defeated L, Watari, Rem, Mello
- Cured Ryuk’s boredom
- Was the top student of the entirety of Japan
- Kept his identity of Kira successfully hidden for many years
- Gained an absurd amount of followers which includes entire countries
- Reduced the global crime rate by 70%
- Avoided the forces of the JP police, NPA, and JP Task Force
- Defeated L, Watari, Rem, Mello
- Cured Ryuk’s boredom
Strength
- Able to physically hurt L and send him flying across a small room
- Could swing L up a cliff using their handcuffs
- Claims he can overpower a grown woman
- The Death Note can ignore human durability with heart attacks and suicides
- It’s only been seen to work on humans
Speed
- Kept up with and beat L in a game of tennis
- Both Light and L have shown to be comparable, and likely equal, in athletic ability as both are tennis champions in their respective countries of Japan and England, they would both play a match and were on equal footing for the majority of the game
- Punches L at the same time that he kicks him
- It takes 40 seconds for the death to commence once a name is written down
Durability
- His durability should match up with his strength
- Tanked kicks from L and recovers quickly
Stamina
- Was able to write names down in the Death Note for 4 days straight with very little sleep
- Did all this while he was still in school
- Was able to move and run away despite the multiple bullet wounds he sustained after being shot multiple times
- After getting shot he still had enough energy to leap through Ryuk
Range
- Only uses fists when fighting physically
- The Death Note is able to kill from an entirely different universe, as Shinigami are able to kill humans from the Shinigami realm with their own Death Notes
- Kept up with and beat L in a game of tennis
- Both Light and L have shown to be comparable, and likely equal, in athletic ability as both are tennis champions in their respective countries of Japan and England, they would both play a match and were on equal footing for the majority of the game
- Punches L at the same time that he kicks him
- It takes 40 seconds for the death to commence once a name is written down
- His durability should match up with his strength
- Tanked kicks from L and recovers quickly
- Was able to write names down in the Death Note for 4 days straight with very little sleep
- Did all this while he was still in school
- Was able to move and run away despite the multiple bullet wounds he sustained after being shot multiple times
- After getting shot he still had enough energy to leap through Ryuk
- Only uses fists when fighting physically
- The Death Note is able to kill from an entirely different universe, as Shinigami are able to kill humans from the Shinigami realm with their own Death Notes
Kaguya Shinomiya
Overall
- Managed to become the second best student of Shuchi’in Academy
- Talented in numerous areas, such as dance, martial arts, and archery
- Manipulated an entire school election and drove a candidate out of the race
- Exposed a bully that almost got away with ruining Ishigami’s social life
- Has one of the world’s most influential conglomerates backing her up
- Solved the culture festival mystery
- “Defeated” Shirogane, Ogino, her inner demons, the Shinomiya Zaibatsu
Strength
- With her being the perfect girl, that would also have to include her being athletic
- Equal in physical strength to Shirogane at the bare minimum (and implied to be stronger)
- Shirogane was capable of sending himself flying across half a volleyball court via smacking himself in the back of the head
- Shirogane hit a volleyball so hard into the floor that the floor started smoking (Wall Level)
- Both were on equal footing during an arm wrestle
- The official strength chart illustrates they are almost equal in strength
- Kaguya has also been able to harm and overpower Shirogane on multiple occasions
- Kicked him in the side
- Hold breaked him hard enough for him to pass out
- Able to pull Shirogane into her bed when she was sick and weakened
- Kaguya upscales from every Student Council member due to her victory in the arm wrestling competition
- Kaguya >= Shirogane, Ishigami, Fujiwara, Ilno
- She has been able to knock down fully grown men to the ground with one punch
- Her ability to use weapons such as the bow and katana allow her to hit much harder
- Managed to become the second best student of Shuchi’in Academy
- Talented in numerous areas, such as dance, martial arts, and archery
- Manipulated an entire school election and drove a candidate out of the race
- Exposed a bully that almost got away with ruining Ishigami’s social life
- Has one of the world’s most influential conglomerates backing her up
- Solved the culture festival mystery
- “Defeated” Shirogane, Ogino, her inner demons, the Shinomiya Zaibatsu
- With her being the perfect girl, that would also have to include her being athletic
- Equal in physical strength to Shirogane at the bare minimum (and implied to be stronger)
- Shirogane was capable of sending himself flying across half a volleyball court via smacking himself in the back of the head
- Shirogane hit a volleyball so hard into the floor that the floor started smoking (Wall Level)
- Both were on equal footing during an arm wrestle
- The official strength chart illustrates they are almost equal in strength
- Kaguya has also been able to harm and overpower Shirogane on multiple occasions
- Kicked him in the side
- Hold breaked him hard enough for him to pass out
- Able to pull Shirogane into her bed when she was sick and weakened
- Kaguya upscales from every Student Council member due to her victory in the arm wrestling competition
- Kaguya >= Shirogane, Ishigami, Fujiwara, Ilno
- She has been able to knock down fully grown men to the ground with one punch
- Her ability to use weapons such as the bow and katana allow her to hit much harder
Speed
- Precise enough to catch a fly with chopsticks
- Was able to change a phone battery in under a minute
- Could tie and untie a stem with her tongue in the blink of an eye
- Outran a group of grown men who were chasing her
- Left the broadcast station immediately after the Mass Media club members walked in the room
- Can easily catch up to Ishigami, who was a former jock in middle school
- Kaguya and Shirogane are equal in running speed as stated by Kaguya herselfShown when Shirogane kept up with and chases after Kaguya and vice versa in the Ice Kaguya arc
- Reacted to Shirogane whipping her with a towel, appearing as a blur (Subsonic)
- For a human to appear as a blur to the human eye, they'd have to be going at speeds faster than the eye could see
Durability
- Her durability should naturally match up alongside her physical strength
- Slammed her head on the table and immediately recovered
- Survived her own brain starting to physically smoke from her mindset being thrown off
- Her durability should naturally match up alongside her physical strength
- Slammed her head on the table and immediately recovered
- Survived her own brain starting to physically smoke from her mindset being thrown off
Stamina
- Dragged Shirogane’s and Ishigami’s unconscious bodies outside of the Student Council room
- Managed to last 16 minutes in a tug of war with Fujiwara
- Shirogane was being used as the rope
- Dragged Shirogane’s and Ishigami’s unconscious bodies outside of the Student Council room
- Managed to last 16 minutes in a tug of war with Fujiwara
- Shirogane was being used as the rope
Range
- Mainly uses her fists while fighting
- Can utilize melee weapons at her disposal such as katanas
- Skilled with a bow and arrow which can go multiple meters
- Mainly uses her fists while fighting
- Can utilize melee weapons at her disposal such as katanas
- Skilled with a bow and arrow which can go multiple meters
Weaknesses
Light Yagami
Despite his near-perfect accomplishments throughout the events of Death Note, he has some major flaws that could (and have) absolutely ruin his plans of godhood. Most of his schemes may have gone flawlessly but he’s made plenty of mistakes along the way. He’s the kind of guy to plan out in advance but when that master plan goes wrong, he completely loses his composure. Only luck has the ability to save him but luck can only take him so far before he suffers a grim fate. Light doesn’t even take the time to consider all possibilities when he makes a move which has led to more blind-sided mistakes he’s made throughout the series.
His enormous god complex makes him believe that only he is the best, so when that superiority is questioned or Kira’s killings are labeled as evil, Light lets his emotions get the best of him and he lashes out which can and has easily backfired on him. L described Kira as cocky and claims he's childish for hating to lose, meaning that he'll always respond to anyone challenging him with his own challenge. On top of that, his arrogance gets in the way of him ever using the Shinigami Eyes. Speaking of ego, Light thinks so highly of himself that he turns out to be a pretty poor commander as he wasn’t able to use people such as Misa and Mikami to the best of their ability. He expects them to be on the exact same level of intelligence as he is and yet he becomes frustrated when they’re unable to do exactly what he wanted. He couldn’t help but be suspicious and completely untrusting of even his own allies, which would end up severely reducing his power and even cost him his win when Mikami’s mistake would expose him as Kira. Overall, the more success he has, the more overconfident he is which leads to dumb decisions.
Light is restricted even in the position of L since there have been governments that were reluctant to assist the person behind “L”, no matter if it was L himself or Light hiding behind the identity. Kira would have just as much suspicion behind his actions and he wouldn’t be able to send other countries’ military forces to kill anyone in Japan without revealing to his target that he is in fact after them. It would especially accomplish nothing if that group/investigator is not from that government’s home country. You can’t have L’s resources without including the Task Force, and they would also prove to be an obstacle as Light would have to really reason with them in order to target anyone that isn’t in their current line of suspicion.
Without even a single scrap of the Death Note, he is useless in a fight since he is still human at the end of the day and is very much vulnerable to anything that would injure a normal person. The Death Note also contains a lot of general restrictions which I already mentioned before, such as how he needs his opponent’s face and full name to kill someone as well as the time to write the name in the Death Note along with the 40 seconds he has to wait for the death to go through.
Despite his near-perfect accomplishments throughout the events of Death Note, he has some major flaws that could (and have) absolutely ruin his plans of godhood. Most of his schemes may have gone flawlessly but he’s made plenty of mistakes along the way. He’s the kind of guy to plan out in advance but when that master plan goes wrong, he completely loses his composure. Only luck has the ability to save him but luck can only take him so far before he suffers a grim fate. Light doesn’t even take the time to consider all possibilities when he makes a move which has led to more blind-sided mistakes he’s made throughout the series.
Kaguya Shinomiya
As intimidating as Kaguya can be, she has some big weaknesses her opponents could exploit. Despite her ridiculous strength and speed for a high school girl, she is still human, so any human weakness such as a bullet or blade, and especially a heart attack, could easily put her down. Her ears are naturally sensitive to intense stimuli such as loud sounds and her brain can “fry” if elements of chaos enter her brain, in which she’ll need sugar to strengthen her brain again.
Due to her traditional and sheltered upbringing, Kaguya knows next to nothing about technology as well as anything relating to sex or social cues (although she soon becomes somewhat familiar with the latter two during the course of the story). Her physical condition is also always dependent on her mental state, which can be severely affected if her emotions are messed with, such as if the topic of love or Shirogane is brought up. Depending on what’s said, her reaction can vary from gaining the motive to murder to instantly becoming your best friend, providing an easy way to manipulate her emotions.. She can even become flustered enough to have her heart give out and force her to pass out on the spot. Her overall state of mind is caused by the amount of pressure she feels on the daily, leading her to be cautious and vulnerable to overthinking and anxiety.
Kaguya’s biggest weakness is when she becomes unable to think clearly, whether it’d be from sickness or staying up too late, which she turns into an idiot due to her loss of ego and id. This is yet another result of her using her brain to the extreme on a daily basis, appearing as if she was awake but she’s basically dreaming and won’t remember anything that happened in that state when she wakes up. In general, a majority of her weaknesses are very context-specific and wouldn’t be figured out by most, but her most exploitable weakness is one that she shares with Light: not knowing what to do next when her meticulously crafted plan goes wrong. Kaguya’s plan can easily be figured out and easily taken apart if she either becomes flustered enough to lose grip of her logical side or encounters a situation she never could’ve expected, especially if that situation is of the chaotic variety.
Even the Shinomiya company has some hiccups in their system that could provide an opening as proven in the final arc of the manga. With enough sources of pressure from different angles, there is always the chance that one could bypass the security of the group if they play their cards right. On top of that, most of the major players in the Shinomiya company can tend to underestimate anyone who opposes them if they aren’t a group that seemingly has enough power to do so. There’s one last thing I’d like to bring up… remember how Kaguya would struggle to adapt to the unexpected? It turns out that her more traditional-based and rightist brother are even more static in their response to scenarios they never expect.
Before the Verdicts
“Shouldn’t the Love is War anime be non-canon because it gives completely new endings to certain chapters that were adapted? Also what’s the deal with the Mass Media Spinoff canon?”
Well, not exactly.
Outside of those few changes, the anime has either consistently stayed one-to-one with the source material or added new content that connects scenes together or adds visual flair to certain moments. This kind of content is the kind that I consider a part of the canon so these are all valid for the blog.
Overall, there’s nothing too drastic when you compare the anime to the majority of the chapters that were adapted but there are three DRASTIC changes in specific that would boost Kaguya’s stats HUGELY. I’m of course referring to these three scenes from Season 2 of the anime:
From Episode 3:In this scene, Kaguya becomes so flustered that she telepathically split the moon in half out of sheer embarrassment.
To split the moon completely in half, Kaguya would need to be outputting 61.532 Petatons of TNT, putting her AP at the Multi-Continental level.
Also from episode 3:In this scene, Shirogane becomes so embarrassed by his actions from the night prior that he wipes the window hard and fast enough to create a giant laser that leaves the atmosphere within 2 seconds.
By using this feat from Shirogane, Kaguya can then be preemptively be scaled to his speed.
From episode 12:
In this scene, a chain of events occur which leads to a huge balloon combusting and exploding not just the entire school but exploding large enough to have its shockwaves be seen from outer space.
Considering that the wide shot showed the entirety of Japan to be covered by the explosion, the explosion would have to at the very least be Country Level+.
Both Shirogane and Kaguya were at the center of the explosion and yet they turned out to be completely fine besides a few scratches.
I must reiterate that NONE of these scenes were in the original manga but were either scenes that added on to the original content or completely reworked the ending such the case with our third scene. With that in mind, I won’t be considering these scenes a part of the main canon for obvious reasons.
While I must admit that including these feats would be hilarious, there are three main reasons why some would find these to be unreasonable.
One, it would make this fight incredibly one-sided in Kaguya’s favor despite Light’s ability to one shot. This will make a lot more sense when I talk about my actual verdict.
Two, it would somewhat ruin the fight’s potential if they were to confront each other physically. What would be the stakes of a potential mental fight between the two if Light can be easily overpowered and, more importantly, blitzed before he can write Kaguya’s name in the Death Note? Light doesn’t have anything close to that level of power unless we use composite versions, which is why I clarified that we would only use their canon versions. This way, we can make the fight as equal as possible so apologies to anyone that reads this blog expecting those crazy feats but if you wanna argue otherwise then uhh feel free to.Three, if you really wanna be nit picky about the canonicity of these feats (and I know some people will), then you can look to the manga to disprove them.
Oh yeah, as for the Mass Media spinoff, it’s MUCH simpler to figure out. There’s sometimes info that contradicts the main story but the spinoff is overall 1 to 1 with the canon.
“Why are Light’s only allies Ryuk and the Task Force/L’s resources? Why didn’t you give him Misa or Mikami?”
Ok so it may seem weird that I never brought Misa or Mikami up when they're major components of Light's kit but let me explain.
We are only looking at Light and Kaguya at their best as standalone characters along with all the resources and people that they have CONTROL over and direct access to. We cannot composite all of Light or Kaguya’s resources and allies if it ends up comprising them being at their full potential. While giving a character their entire arsenal regardless of context is reasonable for a physical fight, including the intelligence side of the battle would require narrative continuity for the battle to make sense. For example, using the post-timeskip version of Light as the peak of his power would mean that L and Rem would have to be dead. Mikami and Takada would come way after Light’s power had peaked and Misa… well I guess you could make a case for her.
Nonetheless, if we were to give Light characters like Misa and Mikami anyways, then we would be obliged to balance it out by giving Kaguya all the Student Council members which includes Shirogane, Fujiwara and Ishigami. Bloating the fight with too many characters would make this seem less like “Light vs Kaguya” and more so “the Death Note verse vs the Love is War verse”. It’s only fair that we keep the blog under control by restricting them from any outside help and only allowing them to stick with allies and organizations they have on hand. I will still cover what would happen if we did give Light his allies in my own verdict but I'll list what I consider to be eligible.
For Light, Ryuk is always following Light regardless of what he thinks about his actions because he’s in it to just sit back and watch his whole process. Giving him L’s resources would also be reasonable since he gained access to them as the replacement for L in post-timeskip. If you’re giving Light those resources however, then you can’t give it to him without also giving Light access to the Task Force. After all, the purpose of the group was to work with L to solve the Kira case and their role continued on even when L died and Light took over.
For Kaguya, there’s simply no logical way around removing the Shinomiya Zaibatsu or anyone associated with the group/family out of the equation so she needs to have them on hand. This means that Kaguya will have access to her three brothers alongside her father despite what their relationship was in the story (I’ve already explained how they can work together in the brothers’ own section). Obviously Kaguya would get access to Hayasaka by default because her entire life was built upon working as Kaguya’s maid and assistant, and I haven’t mentioned this before but Hayasaka’s family of ninjas also count. They’re not important to the overall verdict but I thought it was worth mentioning here.
I hope this clears that up.
“Didn’t the Shinomiya company get outsmarted by a bunch of teenagers?”
Ok well first of all they were SMART teenagers. Get your facts straight smh.
For real though, that specific arc in the story may leave the impression that the Shinomiya company was never actually that powerful but that’s where you would be wrong. The Shinomiya’s had been put into a weakened position that could only be achieved through too many specific circumstances that Light would not be able to replicate even with sufficient prep time. The Zaibatsu not only had to deal with their leader being close to death and needing to find a successor but they had to fight in an ongoing corporate war against their longtime rival that could almost match them in resources at the same time. They were facing a lot of built-up betrayal and were simply focused on trying to keep their Zaibatsu from collapsing entirely due to its structure as a conglomerate.With all this drama going on over the course of months, the Student Council managed to conceive a specific plan using info on the Shinomiya’s that they could access through their specific connections to create a scenario where it was more convenient for the Zaibatsu to leave them be rather than fully going out of their way to stop them. They were also being massively underestimated by the Shinomiya’s since they were only seen as a group of teenagers to them that would pose no harm. If the Shinomiya group were to go up against someone like Kira however, they would not take the situation lightly or ever underestimate him like how they did with the Student Council. After all, they would recognize Kira as a force that could very well threaten and destabilize the conglomerate if not taken care of.
As for the Zaibatsu’s overall power and influence over the country, it was clear from the start that the Student Council’s goal wasn’t to cause the downfall of the Shinomiya’s but rather just to save Kaguya and then get the hell out of there. All they did was be too much of a pain for the family to deal with so they all just stopped bothering with the exception of Seiryu who was stupidly scared of getting canceled. At the end of the day, the Shinomiya’s were still easily the most powerful family in Japan, and if we want to put both Light and Kaguya at the peak of their power, then we would just have to ignore not only this loss but also their overall decline in power in modern times.
“Why didn’t you mention the official intelligence ranking that was given for all major Death Note characters?”
In Death Note 13: How to Read, we are given stats for every character that ranked them based on six categories: creativity, motivation, social life, inferiority complex, willingness to act, and the most relevant one in this case, intelligence. L’s intelligence was ranked at an 8 out of 10 while Light was ranked as a 9 out of 10. This appears to be contradictory to how equal Light and L were in terms of intelligence in the canon story and you would be right.
It had been found out that the English translation of these stats were actually incorrect as the Japanese version of the word gives us a completely different meaning altogether.
In Japanese, the word says “知識” (Chishiki), which is meant to represent knowledge and not intelligence. The actual Japanese word for intelligence is “知性” (Chisei) which is nowhere to be seen in the stats. Knowledge regards how much you know while intelligence is about how smart you are, which lines up better with the actual story since Light has a much wider range of knowledge as a perfect student in all fields while L is simply focused on being a detective.
In short, the “intelligence” stat in the book is irrelevant to our intelligence scaling as it’s a mistranslation that means something else entirely. We could also use the other categories to confirm Light’s and L’s strengths and weaknesses in other aspects but the feats provided get that message across already.
Shoutout to the original poster for providing this info but tis a shame that Kira got them.
“Can’t you scale Light’s speed to Ryuk’s?”
What? No of course not, that would be silly.
There’s not a single instance where Light could possibly scale to Ryuk’s movement speed.
“Why are L’s resources in a compromised position while the Shinomiya group gets to be at their full power?”
To put it simply, putting L’s resources at the peak of their power would contradict the story.
In case you either haven’t read/watched Death Note yet or don’t recall these easy-to-miss details, once both Watari and L had died, their resources did not go to Light.The money that was left behind by them both went to Wammy’s House which in turn was given to Near. In addition, everything that they both owned such as properties would be shared elsewhere which Light has no knowledge of. Even in the story itself, we only see Light use the physical items that were left behind such as the computer systems as well as L’s voice changer. The reason that it would contradict the plot is that we’re using a post-timeskip version of Light that has already had L and Watari killed many years ago (5 to be exact). Wammy’s House and Near would’ve gotten the inheritance regardless of if the “L” identity had been helmed by someone else.
Not all is lost on the financial side of things however, since as stated in Chapter 76 of the manga by Light himself, there are still wealthy individuals supporting “L” regardless of the danger that Kira posed. There’s no other context given as to if Light has meaningful connections to these individuals or if they’re just “L” supporters that can be fallen back on if the Task Force loses their police funding. We don’t even know how much money these supporters can give to “L” or if their funds can match up to the heights of L’s inheritance (the latter seems very unlikely).
In either case, we just can’t give Light both L’s inheritance and access to the rest of his resources without breaking the logic of the story itself. If we’re going to be giving Light these resources, then he’ll have to either not be given the inheritance or not given the resources at all. In the case of the Shinomiya’s, the simplest way to gauge them at their peak power is by going back in time to before they had initiated the present-day conflict with the Shijo’s. There is no need to weaken them too since the period of time where they were at their full potential wouldn’t be contradicting the story like how L’s resources do. On the bright side, Light at least still has access to L’s voice changer so he can still reach out to contacts in politics and law enforcement if he really wanted to.
Verdicts
Alright, the combatants are set! We’ve run the data through all possibilities and now, it’s time for a DEATH BATTLE!
Toxin
For the sake of simplicity, let’s split the verdict into numerous sections and see where Light or Kaguya dominate in each category.
Physicality
It’s absolutely no question that Kaguya would dominate the category of “physical stats” and “fighting ability”. It can be considered impressive that Light was able to punch L across a room and go toe to toe with him in close quarters combat but Kaguya easily upscales from everything Light’s done physically. She not only scales to Shirogane and his floor smoking feat but she’s able to move faster than the eye can see. Even if you wanted to argue that the blur lines ≠ subsonic speeds, there’s no doubt that Kaguya will always be faster than Light simply due to her multiple occasions of showing how physically impressive she is. Her mastery of certain martial arts would also let her redirect any physical attack that Light could throw at her and her precision guarantees that she’ll always hit her attacks. The only physical category where Light has the advantage is stamina, which could actually hold him out until he finds an opening, but Kaguya is too much of a tank and she wouldn’t be stupid enough to let her guard down. To add insult to injury, Kaguya’s arsenal gives a variety of weapons that give her plenty of reach and even potential instances of one-shotting Light.
Arsenal
Speaking of arsenals, Kaguya boasts a wide array of weapons that she could technically have access to at any time since the Shinomiya Zaibatsu would be backing her up. Whether it’d be the bow that she can always perfectly aim or a taser with enough volts to kill someone + its double use a memory wiper or even a katana she never uses in the story but is granted to her nonetheless. Any other items in her arsenal that I haven’t mentioned are either relegated to intelligence battles or are owned by the Shinomiya group themselves so I won’t talk about those here. With all that being said, I do think Light actually takes the “arsenal” category here. Kaguya may have the grander arsenal but it’d only really be useful when A) you need to kill someone and B) when you’re physically in the same room as them. Kaguya would need to find Light before she can take any physical action.Meanwhile, if Light were to ever catch wind of Kaguya’s name and eventually her face (more on this later), then all he would have to do is write her name in the Death Note and he would’ve already won. He doesn’t even need to be anywhere near Kaguya; in fact, Light could be hundreds of miles away and still kill her with the book. It doesn’t help that the Death Note bypasses durability and has its own special functions that Light has used to his benefit such as mind control and (his own) memory erasure. Even when all ends up failing and Light doesn’t have the Death Note in his hands, he can still turn to his watch for one final chance at killing his opponent. The Shinigami eyes would also be a huge advantage as basically nobody but Light would know of their existence, but that’s only assuming that Light would actually use them to begin with (he won’t).
Intelligence
Moving on, let’s discuss the category that essentially defines this matchup: intelligence. Who is the overall smarter one? Who could easily outsmart the other by thinking outside the box- it’s Light. I mean that would be the obvious choice right? He was the #1 student of Japan, he has manipulated numerous skilled investigators including the world’s best detective, and his schemes are much grander than anything Kaguya’s managed to pull off. Socializing with his high school friends allowed Light to understand how he could manipulate people’s emotions and Light took some… creative liberties with his schemes as he’s pulled off the craziest of ideas. Nonetheless, although Light has showcased his smarts during his battles, he wouldn’t have ever been as dominant if he had no power to manipulate events to his favor. He was carried by the power and the mystery surrounding the Death Note which becomes much more apparent when you look at what Light has done post-timeskip and compare it to his pre-timeskip counterpart.Light was essentially fighting a handicapped L during pre-timeskip, subsequently caused by L’s moral limitations that prevented him from doing everything he need to in order to win, as well as L not knowing of the existence of the Death Note and Shinigami’s as a whole. Of course this wouldn’t prevent L from taking the right steps towards deducing Kira’s identity but this proves that L wasn’t on top of his game, and if Light was struggling against this version of L, then he simply cannot compare to L in terms of analytic and strategical smarts. He is still very much a good strategist, especially compared to someone like Kaguya, but in his own verse, he’s been beaten out. Post-timeskip events prove this further by Light incapability to prepare against the likes of Mello and Near. As “L”, Light was given full control of the kidnapping operation by Near as a sort of test of his capabilities, and not only did Light make inadequate preparations to deal with Mello and his crew but Mello was able to deduce that there were two Death Notes and ultimately get access to one. Light would also fail to prepare against Near when they eventually confronted each other as Near read him like a book and anticipated every move that Light would make. Keep in mind that both Mello and Near were considered inferior to L in smarts, but despite their gap in intelligence, both of their efforts were able to put Light into danger and eventually take him down. This is all not even mentioning how fate was generally on Light’s side as he took extreme longshots that had almost no chance of succeeding, but despite the odds the series treats it as if it was supposed to happen. It would be harsh to say that Light cheated but the writers were basically on his side until the final few chapters of the story.
In comparison, Kaguya doesn’t have as many caveats to her intelligence. Being born with a photographic memory, Kaguya is naturally smarter and her numerous battles against Shirogane prove that she can stand equally against the same guy who scores top 1 in national exams, even if she does always end up getting second place in school exams while he got first. She may not seem that competent in terms of intelligence since she doesn’t quite understand emotions like Shirogane does and her plans don’t always go how she wants them to, but like I mentioned before, they’re usually caused by factors outside of her control or her general stubbornness. You have to remember that Un’yo and the Shinomiya family had raised Kaguya the way they did in hopes of turning her into another cold manipulator that could be used by the family, meaning that Kaguya got first hand knowledge from experienced manipulators on how people think and how she could take advantage of them on a psychological level. That’s not the only category she succeeds in since her enhanced senses and logical mindset give her the best analytic smarts. That’s not to say that Light isn’t just as good with his deductions; he had noticed his room had been messed with (set up was previously made to ensure that Light could tell his room had been messed with) and he could predict the moves of L and Near. It’s just that Kaguya would have the natural advantage in this field which is proven by the many times she’s analyzed a situation and calculated the best move to make so that she could have the high ground. I haven’t even mentioned that Kaguya can give herself a boost in intelligence by switching to her Ice Kaguya persona, which apparently makes her 100 times smarter according to Kashiwagi. Now of course taking this at face value would be kind of silly but there is clearly an increase in intelligence being shown here.
In short, Light is more academically, emotionally, creatively, and strategically intelligent while Kaguya is more psychologically and analytically intelligent. Even though Light takes the win on intelligence, Kaguya isn’t too far behind for it to be considered a stomp.
Main Allies
In terms of main allies, this category goes to Kaguya. Light may have a literal death god on his side but it turns out that the full time maid has more to offer as support to Kaguya. Hayasaka not only shares the same physical and manipulative capabilities as Kaguya to a degree but she has expertise in areas where Kaguya is lacking such as technology and emotional intelligence. With technology specifically, she has the ability to hack into computer systems with no issue as well as her own tech that would allow her to stay in contact with Kaguya. Her disguises would fool anyone into thinking she was a completely different person, and if things get desperate, Hayasaka could always disguise herself as Kaguya, which both tactics are good counters against the Death Note.Meanwhile, Ryuk is certainly a force to be reckoned with but he clearly doesn’t have the intention to engage in physical combat. Carrying people with one arm, flying at subsonic+ speeds, and tanking explosions are no small feat along with having access to the Shinigami eyes and his own Death Note but it would against his very nature to kill someone without the Death Note or to kill someone to save another person, aka Light in this case. It’s not like Ryuk is completely useless however since it only takes an apple or two to bribe Ryuk into information gathering or making him lookout for anyone following Light. In the grand scheme of things, Ryuk just wouldn’t be able to provide as much assistance as Hayasaka could in both their actual stories and this hypothetical battle.
Influence
I saved this category for last because I am well aware that this could be the most controversial one out of them all. It’s also one of the more meaty topics of the debate so let’s get into it immediately.
Using a post-timeskip version of Light gives us the most influential version of Light as he has access to both the identities of “L” and Kira. These two identities have the capability to influence the entirety of Japan on a country-level scale along with other countries such as the U.S and Britain being under their influence too, essentially making them both influential on a global-level. However, there’s not enough evidence present in the series to concretely say that Light has the capabilities to use L’s resources to the extent that the original L did.Hypothetically Light can use the voice changer and reach out to contacts to law enforcement around the globe but without L’s experience and contact list, how would he know who to call that’ll help him most? A lot of the data that L had, which included his contact list and personal information, was erased upon Watari’s death. Without this info, Light wouldn’t be able to figure out how L conducted business as well as what cases L was still attached to and which people L was in frequent contact with. There were even people out in the world that knew that L died (albeit only very few people that were close to L) so Light would not be willing to take any of these risks. Just to clarify, there were times where Light has used L’s identity to his advantage such as when he ordered the president of the U.S to do his bidding but situations like that only rose up because Light wasn’t the one to initiate. The president’s own safety was being threatened by Mello and his gang hence why he decided to call “L”; this situation was a result of a chain of events only plausible in the Death Note story so Light wouldn’t get this same advantage a majority of the times that he fights Kaguya, if at all to begin with. Even if we gave Light the benefit of the doubt and let him call for the help of other countries, it would still be suspicious of him to send entire military forces after a suspect without basis, and it’s not like he can force them to anyways since he would have to reason with the Task Force when making moves as “L”. It would make sense for Light to accuse the Shinomiya Zaibatsu of being Kira but it’d be hard to convince the other members of the Task Force without any hard evidence to back it up. It’s not like Light can even use the riches that L used to have since his inheritance went straight to Wammy’s House and Near, and although “L” still gets money from outside sources, using L’s resources simply has too many caveats that would prevent Light from using them without being bitten in the ass by a consequence of his actions.
At the very least Light still has access to his Kira identity which arguably has made a greater influence on the world as a whole. He has millions of supporters to his name and entire countries are willing to listen to Kira; it’s also worth noting how the world’s crime rate dramatically dropped over the 7 years that Kira had been killing. He may not have the full trust of the government or the funds that L did but the true influence of Kira should not be underestimated.Moving onto Kaguya, I think I’ve made it clear that the Shinomiya group is an obvious and yet essential aspect of Shinomiya’s chances of holding out in this fight. Just looking at riches alone, even if we were to turn a blind eye to the logic of giving Light L’s entire inheritance, it would still be dwarfed by the Shinomiya’s total amount in assets alone, a comparison of around 98.5 billion to around 1 trillion in U.S. dollars. There could absolutely be an argument to boost either of their numbers even higher but that’s besides the point. This conflict isn’t something money could solve alone as Light and Kaguya would have to begin their games of cat and mouse at a distance. Despite the seemingly insurmountable despair that Kira brings upon Japan and the rest of the world, the Shinomiya group actually have a counter to almost everything Light could throw at them.
While Light would have the capability of finding Kaguya’s full name due to her ties with the Shinomiya’s, finding a picture of her face would be practically impossible. The corporation’s restriction of Kaguya’s face appearing in the media would actually be beneficial for once as Light would have to acquire a picture of her face through other means. Unfortunately for Light, those other methods would be rendered impossible by how far of a reach the Shinomiya has on Japanese society. Their influence over the Japanese police force would make it difficult for Light to access police files relating to the Shinomiya family and even if Light struck when no one was looking via hacking government records, skilled hackers working for the Shinomiya family such as Hayasaka would prevent that info from ever leaking out. There is the possibility that Light’s dad could assist him and hack into their files like how he did with the FBI but it once again poses the issue of how Light can pin the Shinomiya group of being Kira if he doesn't have any proof to back it up.What truly makes the Shinomiya’s such a problem to deal with is that they’ll always have the upper hand with matters relating to Japan. The family has been an old established name with many long standing alliances and agreements across every part of Japanese society, giving them immense influence in everything related business to politics to legal matters. Despite the identities of “L” and Kira having shown to be outstandingly influential within Japan, there’s nothing stopping the Shinomiya’s from overriding the commands from either identity if they so wished. In Kaguya’s own verse, the Shijo group was a corporation that was almost on par with the Shinomiya group and even outclassed them in terms of business practices and working at an international scale, but without that same level of trust influence within the confines of Japan, they were unable to achieve the power that they needed to overtake the Shinomiya’s. “L”, and subsequently Kira, are in similar positions with their worldwide influence and trust with entire countries, and yet the Shinomiya group is considered much more powerful within their home country. While Light technically has the superior influence with his power being at a worldwide scale, this specific battle would actually give Kaguya the upper hand in influence. With such an excessive amount of control in her home turf of Japan, it would pose a problem for a certain serial killer that just so happens to reside in the same country… and yes, Kaguya can in fact figure out Kira resides within Japan.
It doesn’t take the most complex of deductions to find out that a majority of Kira’s victims are from Japan. With that information in mind, Kaguya could absolutely make the connection that Kira lives in Japan with how her mindset is usually on the logical side + how she could solve the cultural festival mystery when no one else could with the smallest of details. From there, the Shinomiya’s next step could either absolutely screw over Light or give him an opening as the Zaibatsu would want to stay up-to-date with any new info on who’s behind Kira. They would use their trust with the police to possibly go as far as to be a part of the Kira case, gaining the trust of the entire Task Force as an unlikely suspect of being Kira. Light being Light would see through their innocent facade and seize the chance to try and get closer to the Shinomiya family without bringing too much suspicion towards himself. Light’s prior experience with blending in among the Task Force and out manipulating an entire corporation when he had lost his memory of being Kira would be especially useful here as he could gain their trust before completely backing them into a corner before they could do anything. While the Shinomiya brothers are competent in their areas of expertise, there’s no doubt that they are public figures that have their names and faces out there in the world. It’d be really easy for Light to threaten them into obeying Kira if he made them aware that their lives were on the line. Without any other options, the brothers would usually fold under these circumstances.Usually.
If the Shinomiya Zaibatsu were run like any other fair, legal, and foolish corporation such as the Yotsuba group that Light defeated, then they would’ve been goners. However, the Shinomiya family never plays fair. They lie, manipulate, and cheat to get the results they want. Their control of the law lets them disregard and work beyond the law and their mafia-like structure makes them more ruthless than any other corporation Light’s ever had to face. Whether it’d be bodyguards that prevent Light from invading their property, assassins at the ready if anyone tried any funny business, and investigators that would constantly pursue anyone they deem suspicious, Light has a lot to worry about. He would have easily been followed by hidden agents or fallen victim to hitmen had Ryuk not been there to watch for him. Simply put, the Shinomiya company is fundamentally another Mello but cranked up to be 100 times more problematic to deal with.In fact, Kaguya has many similarities with the opponents that Light has faced; opponents like L and Near did whatever it took to solve the case, even if it meant cheating and bending the law… just like Kaguya and the rest of the family did on a daily basis. Even with Kaguya’s much nicer and fairer personality seeming like a hindrance, she was only holding back because she didn’t want to hurt the people she actually cared for. Against other people like Ishigami’s former bully Ogino and school president candidates going against Shirogane, Kaguya immediately decided to use manipulation to cheat for the benefit of her friends. If she was aware of a serial killer being on the loose and threatening everyone she loved, then any form of moral compass would be thrown out of the window. I haven’t mentioned how even if we were to give Light all of his allies such as Misa or Mikami, who can easily use their Shinigami eyes to find Kaguya, then Light’s chances of winning would go down even lower. Light clearly has no ability to lead as his ego prevents his allies from being used to their absolute best, meaning that Kaguya can not only remove them from the equation but manipulate them to the point of being a greater hindrance than to Light. With all those bodyguards and assassins on Kaguya’s side, she can get rid of any suspicious suspects lurking about and make them disappear from society altogether. She would even have the capability to replicate what Near did to defeat Light via manipulating the people Light paid the least attention to to prevent Light from having the upper hand.
Light can’t send any rioters after the Shinomiya’s as they can easily be distracted by huge amounts of money being thrown at them like how Near did so, a Hayasaka in disguise can be sent out to bait out Kira, Kaguya can used her control of the media to bait out Kira like L has done (Light wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice but he would still respond due to his cockiness + Kaguya would tackle such a strategy her own way + she is merciless enough with her words to insult Kira in such a way to cause Light to slip up and give the company more info on Kira), so on and so forth. I could go on and on but to keep it simple, Kaguya has many, MANY more options to influence Light while at a distance, meaning that she has taken this category.So… can Kaguya solve the Kira case?
Yeah.
This is very much a BOLD take but by using everything at her disposal along with her usual strategy of chipping away at her opponent until she finds a weak point to strike, I do believe Kaguya can bait out Light and confront him physically within a week or two. From that point on, it could very well be game over for Light. Then again, Light has gotten out of some crazy situations and has numerous schemes up his sleeve so maybe he could cook up something wild enough to take down Kaguya but a majority of the time, Kaguya can and will take the win.The winner is Kaguya Shinomiya.
Round 1 Fight
NormallyNormal
Hey hey people, it is I, NormannyNorman. Here to give my verdict.
This match is incredibly complex, and has a ton of variables to go over, so let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first.
Kaguya easily takes the stat trinity no problem. She is pretty blatantly superhuman with wall level feats while Light is, at best, peak human, maybe a little over. Nothing Light has can compare to Shirogane's volleyball spike or her leaping from one floor to another. Speed is also a similar story, she's reacted to attacks moving faster than the eye can see and can move in the blink of an eye, no competing with that.
Now, technically, we also have to consider endurance and range, in which case, Light would hold an advantage. Writing names for 4 days straight while dealing with schoolwork and very little sleep is definitely higher than 16 minutes of tug of war. Also, the Death Note can operate across a universe's worth of distance, while Kaguya can only reach opponents a couple of meters in front of her at most... however, the Death Note's limitations can make this point contentious, and I'll explain why later.
Overall, while Light has some edges, Kaguya solidly takes stats.
Now, the tough part...
Both have massive corporations backing them, so figuring out which one is greater is tricky... or it would be if it wasn't for one tiney-tiny thing, Light didn't inherit L's inheritance. Because of this, the only real financial support he will be getting would come from unknown benefactors and reluctant governments, who would likely refuse to aid due to the Shinomiya Zaibatsu's influence. Remember, they are seen as a mafia even in outside countries, which makes it very unlikely for the already doubtful governments to get involved, leaving Light without a lot of resources, especially when compared to the Shinomiya Zaibatsu's $1 trillion in assets, and with their control over the police force and influence over the country, Light would realistically only have access to the Japanese Task Force and their server systems... which would be useless due to the Shinomiya Zaibatsu preventing any news, images, or even the vague location of Kaguya from being known to anyone outside of Shuchi'in Academy.
Now, despite all of this, Light still has one thing that Kaguya would struggle against, the Death Note itself. Once he figures out her name and face, she would be done for, right? Well, that's MUCH easier said than done. Besides the obvious fact that he'd have no leads to finding out who she was, the week of prep time would mean that she could easily do research onto Kira. Kira being able to kill others through looking at them is basically public knowledge, and with her own genius, combined with Hayasaka's help, she could definitely piece together that it's important to keep her identity a secret, which leads us to Hayasaka's perfect disguises. Kaguya is already a master at shifting personalities, and combined with her own and Hayasaka's disguising skills (being precise enough to perfectly imitate Kaguya) there's no doubt she could make herself look like a completely different person, making it nigh-impossible for Light to actually kill her, since he would have no way of knowing what she actually looked like. This would also counter one of Light's biggest wincons, forcing someone who knows her to tell him her name and location, since even if he did manage to pull this off, he'd have to also figure out exactly what she looked like... with no photographs to base it off of... and no way to really find one. Let’s not forget the fact that Kaguya could simply send everyone who knows her, or even herself, to a secluded, far away country where Light could never find them, as her family has the influence to do this. In such a scenario, Light would genuinely be stumped, as he would have no way to ever find out where she went.
This match is incredibly complex, and has a ton of variables to go over, so let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first.
Stats
Now, technically, we also have to consider endurance and range, in which case, Light would hold an advantage. Writing names for 4 days straight while dealing with schoolwork and very little sleep is definitely higher than 16 minutes of tug of war. Also, the Death Note can operate across a universe's worth of distance, while Kaguya can only reach opponents a couple of meters in front of her at most... however, the Death Note's limitations can make this point contentious, and I'll explain why later.
Overall, while Light has some edges, Kaguya solidly takes stats.
Now, the tough part...
Arsenal and Abilities
Now, despite all of this, Light still has one thing that Kaguya would struggle against, the Death Note itself. Once he figures out her name and face, she would be done for, right? Well, that's MUCH easier said than done. Besides the obvious fact that he'd have no leads to finding out who she was, the week of prep time would mean that she could easily do research onto Kira. Kira being able to kill others through looking at them is basically public knowledge, and with her own genius, combined with Hayasaka's help, she could definitely piece together that it's important to keep her identity a secret, which leads us to Hayasaka's perfect disguises. Kaguya is already a master at shifting personalities, and combined with her own and Hayasaka's disguising skills (being precise enough to perfectly imitate Kaguya) there's no doubt she could make herself look like a completely different person, making it nigh-impossible for Light to actually kill her, since he would have no way of knowing what she actually looked like. This would also counter one of Light's biggest wincons, forcing someone who knows her to tell him her name and location, since even if he did manage to pull this off, he'd have to also figure out exactly what she looked like... with no photographs to base it off of... and no way to really find one. Let’s not forget the fact that Kaguya could simply send everyone who knows her, or even herself, to a secluded, far away country where Light could never find them, as her family has the influence to do this. In such a scenario, Light would genuinely be stumped, as he would have no way to ever find out where she went.
Now, due to the insane variability of this match-up, let's tackle some other possibilities. Any attempts from Light to emotionally manipulate Kaguya would be easily stopped due to her Hand Technique and Ice persona allowing her to remove her emotions, making it pretty useless here, while the same isn't necessarily true for Light, but we'll touch on that later. The Shinigami Eyes would basically be worthless here due to his refusal to use them, and even if he did, recall how Hayasaka can perfectly imitate Kaguya. While Light is a genius at picking up on the smallest of details, he has no way to look past a PERFECT imitation, and since he wouldn't know what Kaguya looked like there's a very solid chance he kills Hayasaka believing her to be Kaguya, only for Kaguya to later revive her, now with the knowledge of who Light is (yeah, that shit comes into play lol). Of course, there's basically a 0% chance that Light would ever use the Shinigami Eyes, but this was more brought up as an example to why, even if they were included, they wouldn't really help. Ryuk is a terrifying tool on paper, but his lack of interest in interfering, combined with the limited distance he can fly means that he won't actually impact the fight much. Assuming Light did get to someone who knew of her identity, Kaguya does have the option to erase their memories of her name or where she is currently residing with the taser, and while that would be cruel, that's why we have the Ice persona. And finally, Kaguya constantly has bodyguards and assassins protecting her, so even if Light (somehow) convinced the Japanese Task Force to go after her, and they somehow found out where she was, or he just decided to confront her alone, she would be more than safe (and with the stats difference, she probably doesn't even need help). Now, most of things up until know have revolved around Kaguya stopping Light, but how will Kaguya ever catch Light? Well, recall her massive arsenal of investigators by her side, alongside her own intelligence. One may argue that Light could outsmart all of them like he did previously, but this brings us to the main event...
Tertiary Factors
He has never had to deal with an organization on the scope of the Shinomiya Zaibatsu. Compared to L's inheritance, the Shinomiya Zaibatsu would have 10.15x more money than L, and it's complete control over the Japanese country and influence across multiple others would yield a level of dominance far and above anything Light has had to combat before, and again, 4 super geniuses. Eventually, he will make a mistake as he is manipulated by the Shinomiya, and once he is found, there's not much he can do. Of course, it's important to discuss the wincons for either. As mentioned, this match-up is complex, so we'll be looking at the most likely outcomes for both and work our way down from there. Light's most secure wincon would be to enter Shuchi'in Academy, after extracting her name and location, and confront her face to face, before killing her sometime later. This entire plan relies on Kaguya 1. Not getting her friends and family, or even herself out of the country, 2. Not erasing the memories of her brothers, 3. Not wearing a disguise, 4. Not letting Hayasaka pretend to be her, and 5. Not being suspicious of Light upon meeting him, as he would be a new student that conveniently entered the school around the time Kira would be looking for her, who is a super genius and who also wants to specifically meet Kaguya. All of this combined makes it highly unlikely, and even quite risky, for Light to attempt this and succeed, as him joining the academy at all would turn him into a suspect, and most likely lead to him being caught. In terms of other even remotely possible wincons... yeah, he doesn't really have anything else that's realistically possible. Now, for Kaguya to pull off a win, her best bet is simply pulling the long game. While Light will eventually fuck up, this would most likely take a very long while, but because she perfectly counters all of Light's options, all she really has to do is wait till Light runs out of options and either makes a mistake, or comes to Shuchi'in, where she could pin him down once and for all. Do recall how Light would have to get a look at Kaguya to kill her, which would mean getting close. This is the WORST case scenario for him, for many reasons. A. It would leave him open to interrogation, as Kaguya would naturally try to interrogate a suspect of Kira. B. Even if he manages to escape that, Kaguya would send her investigators and assassins to keep an eye on him, due to him still being a suspect, preventing him from simply writing down her name to win. C. It leaves him very open to being fooled by Hayasaka's disguises, as they are, indeed, perfect, which could lead him into thinking he's won and getting overconfident, similar to the ending of Death Note, which would allow Kaguya to easily figure out who he is. And D. If Kaguya becomes convinced at any point that Light is Kira, she could take him down herself. Recall how she's a martial arts master with a significant stat advantage, a katana, and a bow and arrow. If Light attempted anything rash, she could take him out right there and there, and remember, her family controls the law, so no fear of repercussion there.
Lastly, let's cover their characters. Both can be caught off-guard and fucked over by a chaotic factor they didn't anticipate or plan for, which would normally make it a non-factor, however, Light would have a MUCH harder time anticipating anything Kaguya could do than vice-versa. Remember, Kira's personality and vague ability is basically public knowledge, while Light would have no way to prepare against some of Kaguya's abilities and options. Like, how is he supposed to prepare against Kaguya reviving people? If he ever revealed his identity to ANY of Kaguya's investigators as he's killing them (like what happened with that one detective from Death Note) she could just revive them and find his identity. There are so many ways that Light could lose solely due to Kaguya possessing an ability or attribute that he'd have no way to prepare against. On the other hand, if any of Kaguya's plans ever fall apart, she has back-up from friends and family like Hayasaka to save her from such situations (again, Hayasaka disguise go brrr), and this is truly what this match-up comes down to. While Light's ego pushed away or killed the people who supported him, Kaguya grew and realized how important meaningful connections truly are. While Light's only support is a group who is merely a shadow of their former selves because of him, Kaguya has the backing of people who at least care for her, which is truly the deciding factor. Ironic, in a sense. Overall, Kaguya would take tertiary factors. In conclusion, while Light may be a formidable and seemingly unstoppable foe, and while this battle coukd likely go many, many ways, Kaguya's own training, stats, perfect counters, and variety of support allowed her to track down and end Kira's rule. While Light may have wished to become the God of the new world, he could not survive this battle of war and love.
Summary
Light Yagami
Advantages
- Overall has higher intelligence in more categories
- Three prominent cases being in the emotional, creative and academic categories
- Succeeds more at carrying out complex plans
- Has more experience with dangerous situations
- Superior stamina
- Has the benefit of the unknown which would essentially require the Kira case to be solved from scratch
- The Death Note guarantees death if the name is written down
- Has a wider reach and influence on a global scale thanks to L’s resources and Kira’s mark on the world
- Has the general public on his side including all his obsessed supporters
- Gaining the Shinigami eyes would immediately end the battle
- It would be out of character for Light to resort to such a desperate measure however
Disadvantages
- Is physically weaker and unable to defend himself in a tussle
- His planet-sized ego
- His cockiness creates more opportunities for Light to screw up when he responds to anyone that challenges him
- A much more limited arsenal
- He needs the face and full name of Kaguya to kill with the Death Note
- Has to wait 40 seconds for the Death Note to kill the target after writing it
- Knows pretty much nothing about Kaguya and how she acts/what she has up her sleeve
- Ryuk will only do so much for Light even when bribed with apples
- This is on top of the fact that Ryuk will never physically attack someone as he would never break the Shinigami King’s rule for his own safety
- Needs to work really hard to convince the Task Force and the police to go after someone like Kaguya
- Light, as “L”, can’t call for help from outside Japan without concrete evidence that the Shinomiya group is guilty
- His series fell off near the end /j
Kaguya Shinomiya
Advantages
- Is physically superior in strength, speed and durability
- Has a wider arsenal to choose from with many more options to one shot such as her bow, katana, or Zappy-kun (taser)
- Can still contend in smarts against people who are above her in intelligence such as Shirogane
- Also superior in terms of psychological and analytic intelligence
- Can cancel out any and all emotions she feels in the moment with her hand technique
- Kaguya’s face and private life as a whole is hidden from the public
- Hayakasa being a jack of all trades allows her to be extremely versatile and she would be able to change the tide of the battle in Kaguya’s favor
- Has much easier access to all of her company’s resources
- Has a wider reach and influence over specifically Japan thanks to the Shinomiya Zaibatsu
- The Shinomiya’s have greater influence over Japanese law enforcement
- They also have a greater offense and defense as a corporation than anything Light’s tried to fight against
- The company’s ability to bypass the law would allow for greater cheating and their mafia-like structure would allow them to be much more ruthless
- Switching to her ice princess personality would give Kaguya a great boost in intelligence
- A lot of her weaknesses are too specific for Light to take advantage of
Disadvantages
- Can’t beat out Light in most intelligence categories
- Not as experienced with dangerous situations
- Would not go for the kill immediately
- Once Kaguya’s name is written in the Death Note, it’s game over
- Sensitive to loud stimuli such as loud sounds and strong smells
- More emotionally unstable when things don’t go her way or if she’s caught off guard
- Could be out of the fight if her brain is overworked or messed with
But wait...
Potential
Before I close out my blog, I can’t help but give you an idea of the sheer amount of potential this matchup has that could be tapped into an actual episode. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it’s on the same level as Light’s other matchups, if not better.
While Light vs Kaguya doesn’t have the same specific connections that other Light matchups like Walter has or the story beats that Columbo can provide, it has everything it needs to surpass both. People love Light vs Walter for not just the memes and connections but the themes that are deeply rooted into the fight and the high stakes of the fight essentially being on a worldwide scale. People love Light vs Columbo for the sheer dynamic and interaction potential as Columbo would weave around Light to find a prime opportunity to strike while Light would tap into his deceit and social skills to get Columbo to give out his full legal name. Little do people know, Kaguya has both of their upsides without any of the downsides.
Light and Kaguya may seem like disjointed characters with weak thematics but the inherent nature of their roles boiling down to being the predator of their over the top cat-and-mouse mind games in their stories is just as good as a connection as Light’s and Walter’s themes of rising to power but at the cost of what good was left in them. If anything, Light and Kaguya also share similar thematics related to their character in that they were normal teenagers that just so happened to be born geniuses that were given the exact tools they needed to rise in power in the world at such a young age. This power would come at a huge cost however, as it would have the tradeoff of turning them into the cold and manipulative versions of themselves that only see people as tools and go to extreme lengths just to achieve their goals. They went as far as to create pure appearances that would mask their egotistical and devious sides of them and further trick the unsuspecting to catch them off guard. Their bigger role as protagonists of their drama-based stories allow the audience to grow attached to them despite their mean-spirited nature and experience their great change over the course of the story; bit of a disclaimer, this is where their connections end and their contrasts begin. These contrasts do anything but drag down the matchup however; Light goes on a journey from a genius high schooler that was genuinely worried about Japan’s crime rate to a merciless serial killer that believes he is the only righteous eradicator of evil even upon his death. Kaguya goes on a journey from a genius high schooler morphed by her family to be a cold, calculating, and unsympathetic tool to be used by them to a high schooler who genuinely learned from her mistakes, learned how to love those around her, and broke the chains that her family had wrapped around her from the moment she was born.
One evolved past the point of no return, and one is living proof that it’s never too late to turn back and fix your mistakes of the past. A battle of one who enacts justice through an evil lens, and one who enacts justice out of the good in their heart. There's a clear cut question to be asked here of whether it’s right to move forward despite the consequences or to go back to do what is considered "correct" in the world. A question deep enough to define this matchup and make it stand out from the rest of Light’s matchups.
In case thematics alone don’t sell you on this matchup then I think we can all agree the interaction potential is off the charts. Death Battle has become notorious as of recent seasons for delivering some of the best narrative focused stories they ever had on the show, and while both Walter and Columbo both offer narratives that would make the episode unique from the rest of their catalog, Kaguya allows for a greater variety of character driven interactions that the funny meth dude and ‘one more thing’ guy would have reason to worry about.
Their personalities are similar in terms of how crafty, egotistical, and sly they are, but at the same time their ideals clash against each other exceptionally well and their dynamic would offer plenty of scenarios that would be entertaining to watch. Seeing the two try to trick the other into falling for their trap and watching how they would react to each others’ schemes would let the best aspects of them shine without one of them being forced to go out of character to let the other shine (looking at you Light vs Columbo). It would offer an experience that is unlike anything Light or Kaguya has ever faced in their own worlds and would force them to work their hardest to get rid of the other.
Surprisingly enough, Light vs Kaguya turns out to be an actually debatable matchup as well. There are many arguments you could make for one side or the other and it would line up with all the canon info that’s out there. I’d personally love to see how an analysis would tackle their complex stories and numerous skills, feats, and allies from a versus perspective. Light vs Walter and Light vs Columbo are generally considered to have Light come out on top given that Light is truly at the peak of his power, but the debatability isn’t really there. Walter and Columbo just don’t have what they need to realistically have a chance against Light (which is very subjective might I add) and are being carried by the fact that they’re funny characters… which is VALID by the way I can’t disagree that Light being beat up by the king of drugs and le funny detective isn’t hilarious. It’s just that the last thing I would want is for Light to be downplayed in not just the episode (which I highly doubt they would do) but by the community as a whole. Light is stronger than people actually think he is! Light vs Kaguya can drive this point further by going deeper on what kind of reach Light truly has on the entire world. The same applies to Kaguya as people don’t think she’s versus worthy, and while a majority of her other matchups just wouldn’t work without compositing parts of her, Light is the best opponent for her canon self to be used at its full potential.
As for the actual animation, the greater amount of variety this clash provides can let the fight go down numerous unique routes. Ok now, hear me out on this one, I think Light vs Kaguya can consist of both a mental battle AND a physical battle; I know I know, it’s such a wild idea and would probably cost way more time and money than the team would like to use but let me cook.
The fight starts with the Light and Kaguya meeting each other in an abandoned warehouse. Kaguya would be wearing a mask (for obvious reasons) and she would be followed by numerous bodyguards at the ready. We get a exposition drop of how Ryuk told Light about the Shinomiya’s and Hayasaka told Kaguya about Kira. With them determining the other as a threat to their lives, they would spend a week trying to uncover any info they could possibly get their hands on about the person they’re after (offscreen). It would be told that with them unable to get a lead on the other, one of them would bait out the other into meeting at a disclosed location to finish the conflict once and for all. Now that they’ve met up, we can move past the exposition dump and go straight into the mind games. They would both try to trick the other into confessing their identity, using plans they schemed out ahead of time and their numerous other tactics, and eventually one of them would slip up. No matter who slips up however, a chase scene will be initiated with Kaguya as the predator and Light as the prey.
Light would use the schemes he set up around the warehouse to distract Kaguya as he had saw this outcome coming. Meanwhile Kaguya would use her superior physical stats, arsenal, and the people she set up around the warehouse to give her a homefield advantage. Chaos would ensue as Kaguya would get the chance to erase Light’s memory of her name with the taser but Light would use Ryuk to catch her and Hayasaka off guard and make his escape. This will all lead to a final clash where Kaguya calls out Light for being Kira, driving him insane and turning him into a much more crazy person through sheer panic. Meanwhile all the pressure that the conflict had created would build up to let Kaguya turn back into her Icy Persona self. It’d be a conflict so tense that the surrounding environment would reflect that tension but Kaguya would be able to overpower Light and force him to fall back to the ground. With the Death Note knocked out of his hand, Light would use his final resort as he opens the compartment in his watch and use his blood to start writing Kaguya’s name on the scrap of Death Note stored in it. Kaguya isn’t having any of it however as he would stomp on Light’s wrist, completely shattering it and the watch, before delivering a blow strong enough to make Light bleed out and die. You could go the lame route and make her beat him to death or let her use her bow or katana to pierce him through the heart; what a poetic way to go out.
That was a lot I had to say there but this is just one of many easy scenarios that the episode could set up. I didn’t even get to mention how by bringing Love is War into the mix, you get to bring over the series’ visual effects. If you know anything about Love is War, then you’ll know that the anime absolutely delivers with its visual effects for even the most mundane of scenarios. It’d be cool if they worked those effects into the mental portion of the battle and even the physical portion. Alongside visual effects, the track for this fight would be an absolute BANGER. As of me writing this part of the blog, Therewolf Media’s newest song just released that made a track for the hit matchup ‘Light vs Walter’ (please do check it out I’ll link it below).
This song is just pure awesomeness all around; it made me realize that any of Light’s popular matchups are guaranteed to have a banger track regardless of who they choose. In the case of Light vs Kaguya however, mixing the tense elements of Light’s theme or the first opening of Death Note alongside the dramatic elements and catchy openings of Love is War would make for an AMAZING track. If you haven’t listened to the Love is War openings before then please do they are some of the best openings I’ve ever watched (linked below).
Opening 1:Opening 2:
Opening 3:
Opening 4:
I don’t think I need to explain further on why this track would hit so hard.
Team Kaguya Shinomiya (3) - Toxin, Round 1 Fight, NormallyNormal
Coming soon to a blog near you...
TL;DR: Those who say this matchup has no potential or couldn’t stand up to the behemoths that are Walter and Columbo simply aren’t educated on why this matchup hits so hard. It would hypothetically be one of the best episodes to use as a transition from purely physical fights to intelligence battle and it would be one of the only chances for a GOOD slice of life to get on the show.
Is it a "cringe" matchup? Maybe.
Are people just more attached to Walter and Columbo? I mean yeah I get it.
But does that automatically make it a bad matchup for Light? Hellllll no.
Even if this doesn’t become the episode that Light gets on the first go (…and I would’ve gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling detective!!), all I really want right now is for people to realize how great of an alt Kaguya is. I still respect Light’s other matchups and I understand why they appeal to so many, it’s just that this is my personal preference. Maybe one day we will really get that Light vs Kaguya episode…
Final Tally
Team Light Yagami (0) - NoneTeam Kaguya Shinomiya (3) - Toxin, Round 1 Fight, NormallyNormal
The winner is Kaguya Shinomiya.
Ok so before I get into the next time, I do want to apologize for not creating a new blog for so long. I just wanted to make sure I got this matchup right, it's one of my absolute favorite matchups of all time. That being said...
Next time on Toxin's Death Battle Corner...
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